


Ten Years, Two Weeks

by orphan



Series: Ten Years [1]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Amnesia, Human Bill Cipher, Identity Porn, M/M, Memory Alteration, Past Character Death, Possession, Triangle Bill Cipher
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-14 22:55:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 63,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4583280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan/pseuds/orphan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been a decade since Dipper Pines spent one uneventful summer in Gravity Falls. Now he's back, as the executor of his deceased great uncle's estate. Gravity Falls may have more hipster bars and coffeeshops than Dipper remembers, but some things, and some people, never change. Between lunch with the Northwest-Gleefuls and beers with Robbie, it's almost like Dipper's picking up a life he never left.</p><p>If only things could be that easy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Day 1 and 2

It’s nearly a decade, to the day, when he returns to Gravity Falls. It’s summer, and evening, the sun a fat golden orb sitting just above the tree line. There are things he remembers, like the water tower, and things he doesn’t, like the hipster coffeeshop that serves him a cardboard cup of latte that doesn’t taste too bad, for all it smells of wood chips.

Everything smells of wood chips in Gravity Falls. He remembers that, too. Woodchips and ozone.

He gets lost three times on the way to his destination. Something about the GPS doesn’t like it out here, both the one in his phone and the one in his car. He curses at the dashboard, which does nothing, and is only saved by a handwritten sign, nailed to a pine tree.

It’s a red arrow, and it’s been painted over and over at least a dozen times. Even still, he recognizes the handwriting underneath as his own.

The sign says MYSTERY SHACK, and he follows it. And the next one. And the one after that. It’s not GPS, but it gets him where he’s going.

618 Gopher Road. It sits fuzzy in his mind, a smudged sketch outline from that one summer, a million years and a dozen lifetimes ago. He’s surprised to find the place as ostentatious as the postcards, name writ large on a roof framed by a lilting totem pole. And if the place is more run down than he remembers, more tired, then he figures that’s just what ten years can do.

There are no lights on when he pulls into the drive. There haven’t been for a while, which is the reason that he’s here. Because two weeks ago, Dipper Pines got a phone call from a little town he hadn’t been to for half a lifetime.

 _Your great uncle has passed away,_  the voice on the line had said.  _And he’s nominated you as his executor._

This evening, Dipper kills the car’s engine, steps out onto dirt that grows less grass than the roof of the building above. He doesn’t know why he’s here, not really. No idea why a man he spent one single, uneventful summer with would’ve left him with such a responsibility. Great uncle Stan had been a curmudgeon and a recluse, and they’d never been close.

Dipper sighs, running a hand back through his messy hair. Two weeks. He has two weeks here to sort out his great uncle’s mess. To organize the funeral. Then it’s back to Berkeley, to the postgrad position at EECS. Dipper Pines has a PhD in quantum cryptography with his name on it, as soon as he’s done with the Town That Time Forgot.

Ten years, Dipper thinks, is a long time to be away. Ten years and two weeks.

* * *

His great uncle’s house is just as much a freakshow inside as it is out.

“There’s a jar of  _eyeballs_ , Mabes,” he tells his phone.

“On the counter? That’s always been there. Don’t you remember?” Mabel Pines, five minutes older than her brother and currently some five thousand miles away, at the London College of Fashion. It’s some ungodly hour for her but she said for Dipper to call as soon as he arrived, and so he has. He hasn’t seen his sister much since she left to study, and Skype is Skype but it doesn’t beat a solid dose of Maximum Mabel. If great uncle Stan’s death does one thing, Dipper supposes it gives him a chance to see her again. Her plane is in five days.

“Not really,” Dipper tells her. He crouches down, eye-to-eyes with the jar, spins it back and forth a little. “I’m not even sure if these are real or not.” If they are real, Dipper doesn’t want to think about what sorts of animals they’ve come from. “Mabel, what are we going to  _do_  with all this stuff?”

There’s a pause at the end of the line. “Grunkle Stan left the Shack to us, Dip.”

There’s a weird texture in Mabel’s voice, and Dipper straightens. He’s known Mabel for as long as he’s known life, and he knows what her voice means.

“You… you aren’t thinking about keeping this place, are you? It’s a dump!” It smells like cheap plastic and old man.

“Dipper!”

“It  _is_!”

Mabel makes a disgusted noise, which comes down the line as a burst of static. “Just… don’t make any decisions until I get there, okay?”

“Sure,” Dipper says. “But I’ve already got the wrecking crew on speed dial.”

“ _Dipper_.”

“I dunno why you love this place so much, is all. We only spent one summer here.” And if Mabel remembers that one summer more than Dipper does? Well, so what? She is, as she likes to remind him, the older twin.

She’d kept in touch with her “Grunkle” over the years, in exactly the way Dipper hadn’t. He wonders why she wasn’t named executor. Probably some kind of conspiracy.

“It’s just… it’s  _Grunkle Stan’s_  house, Dipper! And I know— I know you—” Her voice breaks, and Dipper feels like the world’s biggest asshole. The guy did just die, after all. The fact that Dipper doesn’t feel much about the fact doesn’t mean other people won’t.

“Mabel, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…”

“I know,” she says. “I know. It’s… I’m okay. I’ll  _be_  okay. It’s just… It’s late, I’m tired.”

“Yeah,” Dipper says. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Just… I’ll be there soon, okay bro-bro? You stay safe until then.”

Dipper can’t help but grin. “Aye aye, Captain Pines,” he says. “I’ll do my best to avoid the Terrors of Gravity Falls. Like the”—he looks around for inspiration—“like the dreaded Grizzlycorn!”

“Dipper…”

“Or the terrifying Roostdeer!”

“Dipper…”

“Or the horrific… Sascrotch? Seriously? Sascrotch? Who comes up with this stuff? Who pays to  _see_  this stuff?”

Mabel should be laughing. He’s trying to make Mabel laugh, but instead she sighs, and her voice is sad. “Dipper. I’m hanging up now,” she says. “Be safe. I’ll see you soon.”

Dipper has the awful feeling he’s done something wrong, something to upset his twin, and he has no idea what it is. So he stammers out, “Okay. Have a good flight.”

“I will. Bye.”

“Bye.”

And then he’s left standing in front of a stuffed gorilla in a pair of stained y-fronts, wondering what it was that he did wrong.

Two weeks, he thinks. Then it’s over. And he’ll be gone.

* * *

“Well bless my stars, if my eyes don’t deceive me, I do believe that right there is Dipper Pines.”

The voice is too-loud in the quiet diner, and the closeness of it nearly makes Dipper drop his phone. He’s been reading papers on cryptographic theory, shoveling down a barely edible meal of, near as he can tell, deep-fried starch. It’s not a good meal, but it beats eating alone in his dead great uncle’s cold, creepy cabin.

The owner of the voice hasn’t left, is casting a long shadow across Dipper’s table, so he looks up. Into the dark eyes of a baby-faced man with a platinum pompadour and a linen suit the color of a summer sky. Dipper can’t decide if the man is attractive or piggish, and it’s this confusion that kicks his memory into gear.

“Gideon?” he says.

He must get the name right, because the man—Gideon Gleeful, Dipper remembers—smiles, big and broad.

“That’s right,” he says. “Golly gee, sure has been a while.” He extends his hand, and Dipper shakes it. “I’m sorry the circumstances of your return to us weren’t happier, my friend.”

“Yeah,” Dipper says, because he doesn’t know how else to answer.

“Your great uncle’s little venture has been an important part of this town for going on forty years now,” Gideon continues. “Gravity Falls will not be the same without it.”

“I guess.” Dipper’s getting a crick in his neck from straining it upwards. Gideon isn’t tall, but neither is Dipper.

“And your sister? How’s lil’ Mabel doing these days? And will she be joining us in this time of grief?”

“Uh,” says Dipper, because Gideon’s hair is very shiny and his drawl very thick, and something about it… tickles. Dipper has no other word for it, just a strange scratching feeling about an inch behind his eyeballs. Gideon dated Mabel when they were kids, that he does remember. He also remembers it ended badly, but so do all Mabel’s romances, then and now.

Come to think of it, so do Dipper’s. Maybe it’s a curse.

“Um, yeah,” he says, blinking to try and dislodge the itching feeling. “Yeah, she’s in London at the moment. Fashion school. But she’ll be over for the funeral.”

“London!” Gideon is living up to the pun of his name. Dipper doesn’t think it’s insincere, not exactly, but something about it… grates. “Well I’ll be. She always did have such a sense of style, your sister. We must catch up when she arrives.”

“Sure,” Dipper says, though suspects Mabel may have her own ideas.

“But, listen to me go on.” Gideon makes a gesture, as if to reach out and lay and hand on Dipper’s shoulder. He doesn’t, not quite, which is good. Because something in Dipper does not want to be touched right now. “This must be a trying time, so much responsibility to shoulder alone. Why don’t you come over tomorrow? For lunch. Let my family care for yours. It’s the least Gravity Falls can offer, after all Stan Pines has done.”

“Um…” says Dipper.

“Excellent! Tomorrow, noon sharp.”

“I don’t know where—”

Gideon waves a hand. “I’ll send a car,” he says. “It’s the least I can do, old friend. Least I can do.”

“Well. Okay.”

“Very good, very good. See you then. You stay safe now, y’hear!”

“Yeah. Sure.” Funny, because hadn’t Mabel said something similar? As if everyone is waiting for terror and danger to leap out from behind every pine tree in this sleepy little hollow.

Dipper gives a half-wave, watching Gideon leave the diner. There’s a huge white car parked in the street. Not quite a limo, but the sort of thing people with limos drive on casual Fridays. Gideon gets into the back of it, and Dipper watches it leave.

He’s not far behind, unidentifiable food left half-eaten in his wake.

* * *

That night, he doesn’t sleep.

It’s the same bed from that one summer, thin and hard and cold. And small, because Dipper isn’t twelve any more. He’s twenty two, with aching shoulders caused by too many nights spent hunched over monitors and textbooks. Hard mattresses and lumpy pillows aren’t as tolerable as they used to be.

When he stretches, his feet stick out over the end of the bed. When he opens his eyes, the room is flushed bright-gold from the little triangular window at the roof’s apex. It’s brighter out here at night than he’s used to in the city, the moon a huge silver disk, the stars a confused glittering mess.

He doesn’t like looking at the stars, or the window, or the moon. They give him the itching feeling. Like a word he knows but can’t recall, a hole where a fact should be. Even still, he can’t look away. Lying transfixed in the too-small bed, watching and being watched by that awful sky.

When the moon blinks, he somehow isn’t surprised.

The moon blinks, and something’s in the center of it. A long black streak, rotating down from the top.

Dipper sits upright. The moon is looking at him and he should be afraid, he thinks he should be. But there’s something wrong about the room, cold and gray. Washed out and lifeless, and for a moment Dipper knows what this is. Knows  _where_  he is, not in the Mystery Shack, not in Grunkle Stan’s house. Not really, because this is…

This is…

The moon’s pupil isn’t. It’s not rotating, it’s  _falling_. A meteor or a comet, the trail behind it a shadow of smoke against the reflected golden glow.

Dipper is out of bed in an instant, bare feet and bare chest, running from the bedroom and down a set of stairs that seems to wind on for eternity, passing a dozen score of doors. Doors with labels like FIRST DATE and PROM NIGHT and SOCK OPERA.

The latter door is boarded shut. So are many others.

And then old wood is replaced by cold dirt, and he’s outside. The sky is falling, and Dipper can see it properly now. It’s a meteor, a shooting star, glowing red core leaving a scorched black trail across the night. The meteor is falling into the forest, and Dipper is running after it, tree branches slapping at his skin, roots catching against his toes. He knows this wood even as he doesn’t, a hundred forgotten memories, his child’s hand grasped within his sister’s, laughing even as they scream.

In the end, he reaches a clearing. There’s a tree in the centre, a pine tree bigger than any he’s ever seen, towering above the rest of the forest.

The meteor is headed right for it. When it hits, the fireball is red-orange and white. A glare so baleful he has to turn away, to throw his hands up against the heat and the light and the chaos.

When it’s over, the tree burns. And a voice behind him, high pitched and nasal, says:

“It’s not subtle, but who doesn’t love a good explosion? And things are about to explode. You can have that one for free.”

Dipper knows that voice. Knows that, when he turns, when his eyes adjust from the burn of the tree to the gloom of the forest, he’ll—

* * *

—wake up.

And the window will be just a window.

* * *

As promised, the car arrives at noon sharp.

Dipper isn’t ready for it, after too little sleep last night and too long this morning spent pouring over his great uncle’s accounts. A PhD in quantum cryptography looks like grade school homework compared to the accounting practices of one Stan Pines. Dipper’s no accountant, but he’s pretty sure his great uncle was a deft hand at tax fraud, if nothing else. And now Stan’s mess is Dipper’s mess, and he’s left wondering exactly how much liability the role of executor comes with.

Sascrotch nothing, he thinks. The IRS is the real horror of Gravity Falls.

The car outside is the same one Dipper saw last night, big and white and trimmed in gold. The hood ornament is a five pointed star with a stylized eye in the centre. It takes Dipper a moment to place the symbol, but he remembers it eventually; from the Tent of Telepathy, Gideon Gleeful’s own version of the Mystery Shack. Dipper wonders if the thing’s still operational.

The car is still operational, and it has a driver, who steps out when Dipper approaches. He is, Dipper had to admit, drop dead gorgeous, even if he looks more like he should be lying on a beach in L.A. rather than driving cars in the middle of nowhere.

He also has an eyepatch. It goes with the black-and-yellow tailcoat outfit, kind of, but Dipper has to wonder about it. If only because his great uncle used to wear something similar, back when he thought tourists were watching.

“Mr. Pines,” says the driver, and for a moment Dipper hears the echo of a laugh in the back of his mind. It’s not a nice laugh. He feels like he should know the guy, but nothing is clicking, and the driver does nothing else but hold the door open and look at Dipper with an expression the manages to look derisive, even as it’s inscrutable.

Dipper gets in the car.

The guy says nothing else for the entire trip.

* * *

He doesn’t expect to end up at Northwest Manor. Nor does he expect to see Pacifica step out to greet him, arm-in-arm with Gideon. Pacifica, Dipper does remember, if only because she’s been Facebook friends with Mabel for the last decade.

Still, he somehow managed to miss the part where she’d married Gideon.

“Four months ago,” Pacifica says, showing Dipper the ring. It’s set with the kind of diamond that could be used to cut windows. “Just a little, private affair. We didn’t want to make a big fuss. And,” she confesses, voice lowered, “I didn’t want to upset Mabel. What with… you know.”

Dipper does not, not really. He also thinks twenty-two is far too young for marriage, but maybe he’s not one to judge. Dipper’s last boyfriend dumped him on their second date, but only after Dipper had paid for the meal.

He’s secretly terrified lunch with the Northwest-Gleefuls is going to be some excruciating mess of wrong forks and food he can’t pronounce. It turns out to be a small table in a lush garden, eating nachos and ceviche. The food goes down easy, the champagne even moreso, and Pacifica and Gideon are practiced hosts. They ask Dipper about his studies and his sister, he tells them stories about his friends from Berkeley. They laugh when they’re supposed to laugh, and don’t when they aren’t, and by the time Dipper’s on his third or fourth (or fifth?) glass, he’s feeling guilty for the way he reacted to Gideon yesterday. Dipper might have vague memories of Gideon as an asshole, but his memories are also a decade out of date. Maybe judging adults by things they did before they were old enough to drive wasn’t the best way to live.

Which is why, when Gideon asks him about his great uncle’s estate, Dipper sighs and says:

“Honestly? If it were up to me, I’d sell it.”

Gideon lifts one platinum eyebrow. “Oh?”

“It’s Mabel,” Dipper says. “I think… I mean, she was closer to great uncle Stan than I was. I don’t even remember him all that well, I’ve got no idea why he chose me to be his executor. But he left his house to both of us. And I think… I don’t think Mabel wants to sell it.”

“What would she do with it instead?” Pacifica, leaning forward, chin resting on her elegantly laced hands, gold bangles glinting in the sun.

“I don’t know,” Dipper says. “I mean, she lives in London now. I can’t imagine her moving back here to operate some run-down tourist trap.”

Gideon and Pacifica share a look, share a moment. Then Gideon says, “I know it’s forward of me, your great uncle not even put to rest, but, with his property—”

“We’ll buy it,” Pacific interjects.

“ _If_  you’re thinking of selling,” Gideon adds, censure for his wife’s forwardness in his tone. Pacifica sits back in her chair with a creak, lips thin.

“Gee,” Dipper says. “I mean, if it were up to me…”

“Of course, of course.” Gideon holds up his hands, placating. “But the offer is there, and the price will be fair. The Mystery Shack is important to this town. And we would certainly see it would continue to be important for many years to come.”

“That’s… that’s very generous of you,” Dipper says. Truth be told, he’s ready to sign over the property then and there. He doesn’t care whether the new owners continue his great uncle’s legacy or bulldoze the place for parking. So long as it’s no longer his problem. But, “I’ll have to talk with my sister when she arrives.”

“Take your time,” Gideon says. “Some things can’t be rushed.”

“Thanks,” Dipper says, and means it. “I’m sure Mabel will come around.”

After that, they play mini-golf.

* * *

“Hey. It’s Dipper, right? Dipper Pines?”

Day two, evening, and Dipper figures he should be getting used to this.

Some things in Gravity Falls have stayed the same, some are different. Dipper suspects the gastropub is one of the latter. As with the coffeeshop, he supposes not even the edge of Oregon is immune to the slow and awful march of gentrification. At least this place has more edible food than the diner.

“It’s Robbie,” the newcomer says. “Robbie Valentino.”

Dipper has to laugh. “Robbie?” he says. “Oh man.”

He should’ve guessed. Robbie… looks like Robbie. Ten years haven’t changed him much, right down to the hoodie Dipper’s convinced is the same one he was wearing a decade ago.

This time, it’s Dipper who holds out his hand. “Didn’t expect to see you,” he says.

Robbie looks like the teen adulthood forgot, but he shakes like a professional. “Good to see you again, man. And I’m real sorry about your great uncle. Bad business, that.”

“Not bad for your business, though, hey?” It’s a stupid joke and Dipper regrets it as soon as he says it. Robbie’s reaction is a physical one, a grimace and a rearing back of his head, but he’s laughing.

“Aw, man. I guess I earned that.” Then: “Hey, speaking of, I know things weren’t great between us last you were here—”“Dude, I was  _twelve_.”

“Yeah, and I was still a jerk. I figure I owe you at least one beer to make up for it?” He grins, lopsided and hopeful, hands shoved into the pockets at the front of his hoodie. It’s so Robbie—so much like the guy Dipper remembers—he has to laugh. Robbie, who most certainly was a jerk, but over something that happened so long ago Dipper finds he can’t even feel annoyed about it. There’s a weird sort of freedom in that, and for the first time, it occurs to him that maybe this is what it means to be an adult.

“Sure,” he says. “Why not.” He’s still half drunk from lunch, but half-drunk and wholly happy, and Robbie is, if nothing else, a familiar face. Not the creaking cold of great uncle Stan’s creepy shack.

They end up in a booth, laughing over beers, talking about Wendy’s latest exploits in the Himalayas and Robbie’s decision to take over his family’s business.

“You know,” Dipper says, “I wouldn’t’ve picked you as the guy who stayed.”

“I know, right?” Robbie says. “Me either. But…” He shrugs. “Mom and dad are getting older. What was I gonna do?”

“You were in a band, yeah? Do you still play?”

Robbie laughs. “Oh, hell yeah. But, ssh. Keep it on the down-low, yeah? People ‘round here get a bit funny ‘bout a guy who plays death metal burying their loved ones.”

“But you still play?”

“Yeah, man. Got a new album up online. Someone other than mom even downloaded it.”

“Well, the road to superstardom has to start somewhere.”

“Hah!” Robbie says the word, an ironic substitution for actual humor. “Well, y’know, the recording industry ain’t what— Oh, hey. Hey, Eyeball! Over here!” And suddenly Robbie is half-standing, reaching upwards to wave above the booth, trying to get the attention of someone else entering the bar.

A moment later, a familiar face appears at the end of the table.

“He-ee-ey,” Robbie says, grinning. “Dipper, meet the man who usurped the title of Gravity Fall’s biggest freak from yours truly. Bill, my man, this here’s—”

And Gideon’s driver grins a shark-toothed grin and says:

“Dipper Pines. I know. We’ve met before.”

* * *

Bill’s arms are tattooed solid black. So are his hands, including the palms. Dipper can see it, now the guy’s got his shirt-sleeves rolled up. An inky void except for two little bands of skin-colored triangles, one around each wrist. Dipper had assumed Bill was wearing black gloves when he’d come to the shack earlier. Now, he’s not so sure.

The black arms are the second weirdest thing about Bill, with the weirdest being his mouth, which is full of shark-sharp teeth. Between that and the eyepatch, Dipper knows why the guy hangs out with Robbie.

“Lil’ Mountebank let you off for the day?” the man in question says, Bill sliding into the booth next to Dipper.

Bill rolls his eye. “Still working,” he says. There’s something about his voice that gives Dipper the scratching feeling again, even under the bar’s pounding music. He knows he’s seen the guy before—before today, that is—but he’s not sure where or how. It’s not like Bill isn’t memorable.

“Doesn’t look like it,” Robbie is saying.

“What would you know about work ethic, Stitches?”

“More than you know about binocular vision.”

“Har har.”

So maybe the eyepatch is real. The eyepatch is real, and Bill is Robbie’s friend, and suddenly Dipper is the third wheel. Not that he can make excuses and run off, given he’s got a wall on one side and a Bill on the other. Social situations and Dipper have always been casual acquaintances at best. But he’s trapped, so he decides to deal like an adult, and takes another swig of overpriced craft beer.

Bill does not drink, but he does buy. On Gideon’s tab, according to Robbie, because: “You know the guy’s the mayor’s son, right? No one in this town’s gonna charge a Northwest-Gleeful for shit.”

Dipper has vague memories of the mayor of Gravity Falls being an ancient guy surrounded by buzzards. Which, firstly, can’t be right, but secondly, it’s probably not unreasonable someone that old wouldn’t still be around.

“Didn’t his dad sell cars or something?”

“‘Cars’ would be generous. ‘Heaps of trash’ more accurate.”

Dipper doesn’t feel qualified to comment on the businesses of the families of others, given his own, and so says nothing.

When Bill returns, it’s with three beers and no nachos, much to Robbie’s chagrin.

“Dude, we’re  _hungry_ ,” he says. Then, to Dipper, “Eyeball here has an irrational hatred of nachos.”

“No,” Bill says. “I have a rational dislike of watching your hideous little square teeth chewing them.”

“Whatever, freak. I’m still hungry.”

“I got burgers, so deal with it.” A new voice, and a little wooden flag with a number on it, slammed down into the centre of the table.

The new voice is female, and belongs to: “Tambry, you remember Dipper Pines, right?”

“Oh man,” says Tambry, sliding into the booth. “Someone grew up cute.” Dipper tries not to blush, fails, and is grateful for the low lighting in the bar. Tambry, either polite or oblivious, continues: “So is your sister here? I kinda owe her one. For this guy.” She slaps Robbie on the chest, which turns into him slipping an arm around her shoulders. By the time they get to the cooing looks and the kiss, Bill is making gagging noises, covering his eye with his black-inked hand.

“Ugh, get me another eyepatch. Quick.”

Robbie and Tambry flip him off in unison.

* * *

Three burgers and another round of beers later, they’re having a conversation about the social merits of superhero films when Tambry’s eyes go wide.

“Aw, man. It’s Thompson.”

Robbie winces, Bill groans, and Dipper feels like he’s missed something.

“Dude, he’s coming this way.” From Robbie, to Bill. The latter spits a word in a language Dipper doesn’t understand, but which he’s 99% certain is a curse.

And then suddenly Bill’s face is in his face, and Dipper is staring straight into an eye the color of a Bunsen flame, with a pupil as long and thin and dark as a tear in the moon. “Just go with it,” Bill says.

“Huh?”

But then one strong black arm is around his shoulder, and Dipper finds himself crushed against smooth yellow silk, a heartbeat drumming somewhere deep below.

“Oh. Hey, Tambry. Hey Robbie. Hey Bi— oh.”

Dipper remembers Thompson, in the way he remembers all Wendy’s old gang. Except the man standing in front of them now looks nothing like the Thompson Dipper knew, half a lifetime ago. This Thompson is  _hot_ , all broad shoulders and strong arms, shirt tight enough to show off that and the flat plane of his stomach. Sometime in the last decade, Dipper thinks, Thompson must’ve discovered the gym.

His expression, though? His expression is the same. Some mix of uncertainty and disappointment, his eyes lingering on Bill, on where Bill is holding Dipper against his side like Robbie is to Tambry. And Dipper would admit himself not the most clueful when it came to social niceties, but he’s seen enough shitty romcoms to know what this is.

He’s still deciding whether to be mad about it or not when Bill says, “Hey.” It’s not a friendly hey and, this close, the voice echoes. Dipper has a sudden flash of… of red and white? Of a stone plateau and a void of doors and—

—and it’s gone, and Thompson is saying. “So, uh. Hey. Bill. I was wondering if we could. Um. Yanno. Talk? About… about…”

“No,” says Bill, and there’s that feeling again. Itchy and dark and as cold as the space between stars.

Dipper wriggles into a less awkward position, or as less awkward as he can manage, still crushed against Bill’s side. Bill’s arm is surprisingly strong, his fingers gripping Dipper’s shoulder hard enough to hurt. Moving involves levering himself by pushing down on Bill’s chest, which means he suddenly  _has his hand on Bill’s chest_. Thompson doesn’t fail to notice, and his expression is animal shelter ad pathetic.

“Hey, um. Dude,” Robbie says, eyes flicking between Bill and Thompson. “Maybe, like. Not now, okay?”

Thompson is looking at Dipper when he says, “Yeah. Okay. Sure. Whatever. See you ‘round, Bill.”

“Unlikely,” says Bill, and Dipper can’t help but see the flinch in Thompson’s retreating back.

There’s silence as the four of them watch him go, until he’s lost over the other side of the bar, swallowed by the music and the surprisingly large crowd. Then Tambry says:

“Dude. You are  _such_  an asshole.”

Bill makes a disgusted noise, but his arm unwinds from Dipper’s shoulder. Freed, Dipper jumps back as if Bill’s on fire. Maybe, from the heat in Dipper’s hand and the warmth along his neck, he was.

“What was  _that_?” he says, and is proud his voice only squeaks a little.

Bill doesn’t look at him, which is easy, given Dipper is sitting on his blind side.

“Bill’s ex.” Tambry fills in the blanks.

“That,” Bill snaps, “is a gross overestimation of the events.”

“Yeah, whatever dude.” Tambry gives a disgusted little wave. Dipper gets the feeling they’ve had this conversation before, even if he doesn’t really know what the conversation  _is_.

Tomorrow, Dipper will wake up with five little bruises on his collarbone, one for each of Bill’s fingers.

* * *

“Okay, okay. So… ’m just gonna ask about the eye. Whassup with the eye?”

They’ve moved on from beers to shots, which Dipper knows is a bad idea and yet somehow more appealing than spending the night alone in a crumbling shack.

Bill turns to look at him, only the second time he’s really done so. He has to turn a lot to achieve it, so Dipper doesn’t blame him. Also, Bill’s eye is kind of creepy. There’s something wrong with the pupil.

“Bad deal with a sorcerer,” Bill says, straight-faced. “Now he keeps my soul in a jar and I’m bound to this reeking meatbag.” He gestures to himself.

Dipper has a sudden image of a black hand wreathed in blue fire. It’s gone as quick as it comes, replaced by laughter from Robbie and Tambry.

“Dude,” Robbie says. “I thought you lost it in a knife fight with Columbian drug lords?”

“No no,” Tambry adds. “It was pecked out by an eagle when you were learning falconry from Mongolian nomads.”

“Hey, when I heard that story it was a pterodactyl. Pterodactyl is much cooler.”

Robbie and Tambry are laughing, Dipper is drunk enough for the world to spin, and Bill is grinning a shark toothed grin.

“I get it,” Dipper says. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want.”

“How about,” Bill says, “a deal. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” He holds out a hand.

“Done,” says Dipper, because that one’s easy. He shakes, Bill’s fingers smooth and strong and warm, then lifts his bangs away from his forehead. “Boom. Birthmark in the shape of the Big Dipper.” Across the table, he can hear Robbie and Tambry making appreciative noises. Dipper is sure he’ll regret this in the morning, but tonight he’s three beers and a vodka away from caring.

“Congenital,” Bill says, flipping up the eyepatch. “Squeezed out of the cloning machine without it.” He’s not lying, except maybe for the part about the cloning machine. The skin beneath his brow is smooth and continuous, unmarred and uninjured, as if there’s just never been anything there.

“Aw man,” Robbie says. “Three years and we haven’t managed to get that out of him, then you come along and get it in one night.”

Dipper’s hand is halfway to touching the blank space above Bill’s cheek before it occurs to him that’s a really, really stupid idea, even drunk. “Wow,” he says instead. “That’s… that’s kind of cool.”

Bill drops the eyepatch again, covering the space. “Most people freak out,” he says.

“My great uncle had twelve fingers,” Dipper says. “It happens.”

Bill gives him a look at that. Appraising, maybe. Or… impressed? Dipper is too drunk to read it and, besides, he’s getting distracted by the jut of Bill’s cheekbones and the smooth-sharp curve of his jaw.

He really is devilishly handsome. In a freakshow kind of way, sure, but that’s something Dipper can totally work with. Totally.

It’s a moment, definitely a moment. The memory of heat against his palm and the sharp pain of fingers in his flesh. And so what if Dipper looks more like Thompson used to and less like he does? More soft than broad, the body of a guy more likely to lift books than lift weights. Two weeks he’s here, and two weeks isn’t long enough for a lifetime, but it is long enough in the privacy of his own head.

And then Dipper hears Robbie say, “Quick. He’s distracted! Go buy us nachos!” And Bill’s expression drops into a scowl, and his bright-blue gaze rotates to the far side of the table.

“I’ll destroy you, Stitches,” he says. “Creep into your dreams while you sleep and flay your skin. Fry it up, little guacamole and salsa, and have my very own bowl of Nachos Valentinos.”

Robbie laughs, and Dipper feels lightheaded in a way that has nothing to do with the alcohol.

“How ‘bout,” Tambry says. “I get us tater tots instead. Everyone okay with tater tots? No one got any weird hang-ups about those? Dipper?”

Dipper shakes his head, leans back against the smooth wood of the booth, and tries not to think of ink-black fingers and a burning eye.

* * *

By the time they stumble out of the bar, Dipper is way, way not in any state to drive. Neither are Robbie and Tambry, but Tambry’s place is close, and they can walk. Dipper has no such luck.

“So… I don’t suppose you guys have Uber?” he tries.

Gravity Falls does not, as it turns out, have Uber. It does have taxis but, more importantly, Dipper has Bill who, near as Dipper can tell, neither eats nor drinks, and is thus aggressively sober.

He’s also patting at Dipper’s crotch, which is terrifying for the second and a half it takes Dipper to realize Bill is looking for his car keys. Afterwards, it’s still terrifying, but perhaps more disappointingly so.

“Thanks man,” Dipper says when they’ve bundled into the old Toyota. “I owe you one.”

“You’ll get yourself in trouble, saying things like that.” It’s a weirdly aggressive thing to say, but Dipper’s starting to get used to that. Full drunk and half asleep, and he has to admit he’s had fun today. First with Gideon and Pacifica, then with Robbie and Tambry and Bill. Old friends from an old life, picking up not quite where they left off. Dipper knows he’s going to regret things in the morning, but the morning is miles away. Right now, Dipper is being driven home by the cutest freakshow in the northwest, and maybe that’s enough.

“The forest is creepy at night,” Dipper says, as they leave the town and the trees close in. “I remember…” he trails off, unsure. More itching, more holes. A scream in the dark, a light in the void. Something he’s forgotten, three straight lines and one round eye, opening even as Dipper’s close. Then the colors are bleeding and—

“Hey.”

—and a black-inked fist, slamming into his shoulder hard enough to bruise.

“Wha—?” Dipper jerks upright, suddenly awake. When he turns to glare at Bill, the man in question is watching the road with his brows drawn down and his triangle-sharp teeth bared.

“Don’t fall asleep, you overreaching glob of protein,” Bill snarls. “It’s not safe.”

“What? What are you…?” Dipper is too drunk for this. Whatever this is.

Bill makes a noise halfway between disgust and… pain? Dipper blinks, but the world won’t come into focus, and Bill’s expression won’t make sense.

“Sleep when you’re home,” Bill manages. “Not here. You’ll ruin everything otherwise.”

“Ruin… ruin what?”

“Just forget it, Pines.”

By tomorrow, Dipper will have. He’ll also have a headache fit to split logs, and between that and everything else, it never occurs to him to wonder how Bill got back into town.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enjoy today's completely serious business [end credits music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxRQNO8vg2Y)!


	2. Day 3

The queue at the coffeeshop is out the door, but Dipper stands in it anyway. It’s not like he has any place better to be, at least not until his appointment at the funeral home at ten. Appointment with Robbie, most likely, and Dipper is determined to be as bright eyed and bushy tailed as he know Robbie won’t be, if only to pay the man back for last night.

He’s had two Advil and enough water to make him sick. Now he needs milk and caffeine and maybe, just maybe, he’ll start feeling human. Maybe. As soon as everyone around him stops being so awfully loud.

Dipper squeezes his eyes shut, blocking in the headache and out the cacophony, and it’s in that moment of darkness he feels a fist ball in his jacket as he’s yanked unceremoniously sideways.

“Wha—”

“Stop standing there, I got your coffee.”

It’s Bill. Dressed in his work clothes, one fist in Dipper’s jacket, the other holding a cardboard container with two coffee cups.

Bill is deceptively strong, and has no problem dragging Dipper across the cafe. “Hey, wait, I—”

“Large flat white, no sugar. You’re lucky they even have that here.”

Honestly, Dipper didn’t think they did, which was why he’d ended up with a latte the day before.

“How do you drink this stuff? It smells like kitten vomit and dirt. Here, sit.” Which is how Dipper ends up manhandled into an uncomfortable chair at a tiny table. Bill takes the other chair, then puts the cardboard carton in the center of the table. Then he spins it.

“Whoa!” Dipper leans back as, even with lids on, coffee succumbs to centrifugal force and splashes out across the table.

Bill doesn’t seem to notice, just slams his hand down to stop the spin. Then he leans forward, all bright eye and pointed little teeth. “Now,” he says. “Which one’s yours?”

Dipper wants to say,  _Are you always like this?_  except the cups distract him before he’s opened his mouth. There are symbols written on the side of each. Random shapes, triangles and angular lines, dots and joined circles. Not a language, he doesn’t think, just a cryptogram. Except the ciphertext isn’t long enough to work with no context, and Dipper is about to mention this when another part of his brain says:

“They’re both mine.”

Bill’s grin, if anything, gets wider.

“Sure about that?” He leans across the table, eye narrowed. Then, in a mock-whisper: “Spoiler alert: one’s poison.”

Dipper points to the cup on the left. “It’s a substitution cipher over Atbash. It says DIPPER.” He points to the right cup. “Same substitution, but over Vigenère. DIPPER’s the key, and that’s also the plaintext.” He looks up at Bill, allowing himself his own smirk. “I’m a cryptographer,” he says.

“I know,” Bill says, still in the mock-whisper. “It’s on your Grindr profile. Same as your favorite coffee.”

Dipper goes from smug to mortified before Bill’s even finished speaking. He feels like someone just tilted his world forty-five degrees. “I— ah— argh!”  _Great comebacks,_  he thinks,  _very smooth._

Bill just grins. “Dating pool in this cosmic armpit’s shallower than the Gleeful family tree. Can’t blame a guy for trying.”

Dipper still can’t manage anything more coherent than single syllables, and Bill laughs; big and loud and manic. Then he leans back, rocking the chair onto two legs, hands laced across his chest.

“I, um…” Dipper is still not managing words. So he grabs one of the coffees, sips it, and decides it’s exactly as Bill promised, minus the poison. “Um, thanks?” he tries. At least it’s a word.

And that is, more or less, where is ability for smalltalk runs out. Because Bill is handsome and weird and mad, but he’s also, apparently, taken it upon himself to press gang Dipper into a date. Or… something.

Dipper is suddenly wishing for a line of beers with a vodka chaser. His liver might not thank him for the hair of the dog, but his conversation skills might make up for it. He tries to think back to the night before, to what he might’ve said to Bill previously. Something about the guy’s eye? Smooth.

“Um, I like your tattoos?” he tries instead. It seems like a safe enough topic of conversation.

Bill pushes up his sleeves, holding his arms out for inspection. “Who says they’re tattoos?” he asks.

Dipper is pretty sure they’re tattoos, but a memory from last night surfaces, so he tries, “Sorry, my bad. I guess they dumped you out of the clone tank with blue-black skin to the elbow?”

“Shoulder,” Bill corrects. “And thigh. And your first guess was the right one.”

Here, in the daytime, Dipper can see the nails on Bill’s left hand are lacquered a matte black to match his ink. On the right, they’re an iridescent flame blue.

“Wow,” Dipper says, and means it. “I mean, it’s cool, but… why? Didn’t it hurt?”

Bill pulls his arms back, rolls his sleeves down. “Pain’s kinda the point,” he says. “And it got weird, looking down at these gross pink drumsticks all day.”

Not for the first time, it occurs to Dipper that Bill might be legitimately insane. Not in the cutesy arts student way, but in the actual psychiatrists-and-medications way.

“What are your arms supposed to look like, then?”

“You know the color you see when you fall asleep? The one between when you close your eyes and when you start dreaming? Like that. A hundred thousand writhing pieces of that. As vast and endless as a nightmare.”

“Oh,” says Dipper, because what else is he supposed to say? “Well… I think the arms you have are pretty cool, even if they’re not that.” Which, okay. As far as pick-up lines go, is awful, even by the lowly standard of Dipper Pines.

Bill doesn’t seem to mind. “Well, your taste is your own,” he says. “But keep it in mind. Next time you’re feeling sleepy.”

* * *

Things get less weird after that. Bill asks about Mabel, because everyone asks about Mabel, and about Dipper’s life back down south. Dipper talks a little about his last trip to Gravity Falls, about being twelve years old and away from home. Bill listens, chin in hand and elbow on the table, leaning forward and watching Dipper with his one bright eye. As if Dipper is the only thing of any interest in the entire universe. It’s such a weirdly intense feeling, the rest of the world bleeding into monochrome nothingness.

When Dipper’s phone starts buzzing, he nearly shrieks.

“Oh, crap,” he says, lurching out of his chair. “I’ve gotta go. Um, I—”

“Appointment with the morbid Mr. Valentino,” Bill says. “Hence…” and he holds up the second coffee.

Dipper takes it, surprised that it’s still warm. As he does, his fingers brush against Bill’s. The right hand, the one with the electric fingernails. That warmth is even more surprising than the coffee, and it jolts Dipper into saying:

“Um. Hey. I… thanks. This’s been… cool.” Which, wow. Another point scored in the Game of Losers.

“I’m here every day,” Bill says. “Same hipster time, same overpriced channel.”

Is that an invitation or a dismissal? Dipper can’t tell. “Maybe I’ll see you around, then?” he says, heading for cool and landing in uncertain.

“You will,” Bill says, and that’s good enough.

* * *

When he opens the door, Robbie is wearing a suit. It is, admittedly, black, but it’s so un-Robbie that it takes Dipper a moment to process who he’s looking at. It occurs to him the disconnect might be because he isn’t looking at Robbie, goth guitarist, so much as he’s looking at Mr. Valentino, funeral director. There’s something in that, Dipper knows. Something he’ll think about. Later, when he doesn’t have to choose coffins.

Robbie is absolutely on-point professional, patient and sympathetic and understanding as he talks about veneer finishes and releasing the body and open-versus-closed and order of ceremonies. Dipper endures it for maybe an hour, a weirdly sick feeling growing in his gut the entire time.

Finally, he says:

“Dude… I think I need to wait for Mabel to do this stuff.”

“I understand,” says Robbie, in his Professional Voice. “It can be an emotional time.”

“No,” Dipper says. “No, that’s just it. I don’t feel  _anything_  about any of this. About my great uncle. I barely even knew the guy, I—”

There’s a room and it’s dark. Underground. Mabel is there and so is… Dipper doesn’t remember his name, it’s been so long. But he’s there and there’s a… a machine. Three straight lines and a circle, except it’s all wrong, all upside down, Dipper doesn’t know how he knows that but it is, and the circle is on fire and Dipper’s feet don’t want to touch the ground. There’s a red button and he knows he has to reach it, has to stop the world from splitting down the center, and he’s nearly there, so close, except Grunkle Stan is screaming, begging him to stop and—

“… Dude? You okay?”

—and Robbie is there, in the quietly inoffensive room at the funeral home, all tasteful flower arrangements and Kleenex boxes every two feet.

Dipper blinks, his head is pounding and there’s something else, something like the ringing of a bell, somewhere an inch behind his eyes.

“I— I’m sorry,” he tells Robbie. “I have to go.”

“Dipper? Hey, Dipper. Wait!”

But he’s gone.

* * *

The house is full of triangles. Triangles and circles. They’re in the windows, on the carpets, in the shape of the place itself. Dipper doesn’t know what it means when he closes his eyes and something looks back, with something gold and something blew, when someone lost something he knew.

He has a horrible feeling he’s going crazy. Maybe Bill was right about the second coffee. Maybe it was poison, and by the time Mabel gets here she’s going to find Dipper drooling into the carpet, triangles scrawled on every surface.

Dipper isn’t stupid. He knows what the thing he keeps seeing is; the Eye of Providence,  _annuit cœptis_ , the All-Seeing Eye of God. He has a letter on his desk at home with the same symbol stamped at the top, a job offer from a government agency he applied for as a joke. He’d been trying to decide whether the PhD or vanishing into the secret world of government spooks was a better career choice when he’d gotten the phone call from Gravity Falls.

He tosses Stan’s office. Like the rest of the house, the place is a madhouse dumping ground of half-finished rogue taxidermy and ill-concealed tax evasion. Dipper finds a box of fake IDs, all decades out of date, and another box of photos of himself and Mabel, age twelve. Great uncle Stan is in most of them, plus others; Wendy, Mabel’s pet pig, Candy and Grenda, and… and Soos, that’d been the guy’s name. The photos are sitting on top of a pile of letters, written in purple ink and glitter pens. Mabel’s letters. Dipper knows he shouldn’t read them, even when his eyes scan across the words  _says he doesn’t remember_.

And then, buried in amongst it all, is a page of text, written in the same cipher Bill had written on the coffee cups. But this handwriting is uncertain, with passages scribbled out and written over, as if from someone unused to the symbols he was using.

Even still, the cipher is plain, just the substitution. Dipper releases he can read it as easily as he can English. As if he’s spent a hundred hours reading and writing in this script he would’ve sworn up and down he’d never seen before today.

The letter reads:

DIPPER,

IF YOU’RE READING THIS, I GUESS SOMETHING’S HAPPENED. I KNOW THERE ARE A LOT OF THINGS YOU DON’T REMEMBER ABOUT THE LAST TIME YOU WERE IN GRAVITY FALLS. YOUR SISTER THINKS MAYBE IT’S FOR THE BEST, AND WHO AM I TO ARGUE WITH YOUR SISTER? SHE’LL MAKE ME SING THE SONG AGAIN IF I’M WRONG A SECOND TIME.

I LEFT THE HOUSE TO THE TWO OF YOU. MABEL WILL KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH IT, EVEN IF YOU DON’T. BUT YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFUL. DON’T LET ON TO ANYONE YOU REMEMBER, OR THAT YOU SUSPECT. AND NEVER, EVER, EVER SLEEP OUTSIDE THE SHACK. THE SHACK IS SAFE. YOUR SISTER IS SAFE. NO ONE AND NOTHING ELSE.

I’M SORRY THIS IS ON YOU NOW. ALL AN OLD MAN CAN HOPE FOR IS YOU WON’T BE ALONE LIKE I WAS.

REMEMBER I’M PROUD OF YOU, KID.

YOUR GRUNKLE STAN

P.S. THE TAPE’S BEHIND THE VENDING MACHINE. DO ME A FAVOR AND BURN IT BEFORE ANYONE ELSE FINDS IT?

Dipper reads the letter three times before he’s done.

* * *

The vending machine doesn’t come away from the wall, no matter how hard Dipper pulls at it. The thing is ancient, half the coils don’t work, and at least a third of it is filled with Doritos for reasons Dipper can’t fathom.

Behind the vending machine, the letter had said. That’s a clue if Dipper’s ever heard one, but the machine doesn’t move.

Three straight lines and a circle, one pointing up, one pointing down. Dipper closes his eyes, and sees the shape of an hourglass, two triangles set point-to-point. He thinks of the flash from before, the room underground, and he thinks of a tape measure that can rewind time. He doesn’t have the latter any more, but he can still work it in his mind. Starting in that dark and horrible room, heading backwards, up and out and into the light. To the sight of his sister, reaching up to enter a code on the vending machine’s keypad.

Something’s happening, he knows that. It feels like an avalanche, an itch behind his eyes. Like a doorway, hidden behind the wallpaper, found after a decade of disuse.

The underground room, the one with the machine, was under the Shack. Dipper knows this, just as he knows it now shouldn’t be. Just as he knows the code to press on the vending machine’s keypad to open the door to check.

He opens his eyes, keys in the code.

Nothing.

He knows the code’s right, and tries it a second time, just to be sure. Cursing at the machine doesn’t help, neither does shaking it in the way Soos once taught him.

Soos. Dipper can’t believe he forgot about Soos. 

He can believe he forgot about the basement’s second entrance, the vent under the porch. Grunkle Stan may’ve changed the code to the front door, but Dipper can still wriggle through the back.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, he has to admit he cannot, in fact, wriggle through the back. Twelve-year-old Dipper, yes. Twenty-two-year-old Dipper, not so much. At least, not without a good deal of digging.

Dipper figures the Shack’s seen worse, and goes to find a shovel.

It takes all afternoon, the ground beneath the Shack deceptively hard. Memories come back to him as he works, little pieces jiggling loose with each haul of dirt he removes from his makeshift tunnel. A golf cart full of gnomes, a forest full of zombies. A wrecking ball, a helicopter. He’s not angry at himself for forgetting, he’s  _furious_  at whatever’s caused it. At  _whomever_. Furious that they took this from him, his childhood, his family. Grunkle Stan and Mabel, Great Uncle Ford and the journals. He’s not twelve any more; the weird stuff, he can let go. Can maybe even see how he’s better off without it, all things considered. But taking the rest of it, too? That, he thinks, is unforgivable.

Mabel and Stan knew. He doesn’t blame them for saying nothing, because he knows, in hindsight, they did. Or Mabel did, and Dipper remembers tears and fights he didn’t understand, his sister’s panic as she’d make a joke, make a reference, and receive nothing but confusion in return.

He thinks he was fifteen when it started, maybe sixteen. That’s a lot of forgotten years he’s owed. A lot of hurt he’s going to give someone, soon as he finds out who to pay.

By the time the sun sets, Dipper’s back and shoulders ache and sweat runs a river across his brow and down his back. Not to mention he’s filthy dirty, from lying on his stomach in the mud, digging deeper beneath the boards. He’s not to the wall yet, not quite. Tomorrow, he will be. Then it’ll be knocking out some bricks and one little window, and he’ll be in. Dipper’s no longer sure what he’ll find down there. He doubts it’ll be another portal. Thinks instead it’ll be something far, far worse. Like lost memories.

* * *

He’s still angry in the shower, still furious as he cracks a beer and eats a student’s dinner of instant ramen decorated with frozen peas from Stan’s fridge.

It’s the peas, of all things, that set him off. Because he’s here, and Stan isn’t, and until a few hours ago Dipper couldn’t even remember why he  _cared_.

He cares now. He cares in big, ugly sobs against the kitchen table. He should call Mabel. Should tell her everything.  _Something’s been messing with my memories. I’m sorry I ever doubted you._  Should do, but doesn’t. He wants to hold her. To bury his face against one of her sweaters, feel her arms around his shoulders and her breath against his hair. It’s been too long since she left. Far too long.

Four more days. Then she’ll be here, and it’ll be Gravity Falls vs. the Mystery Twins, Revenge of the Redux Edition. Bigger and badder and in life-like 3D.

Four more days. Then everything will be all right.

* * *

He’s woken up by the sound of hammering, somewhere up above. And a voice. Singing something in a language Dipper doesn’t know, but is sure he’s heard before. Every now and again, the banging stops, the singing replaced by a curse. Then the whole thing starts again.

Dipper wonders who could be in his great uncle’s house at this time of night, with the moon hanging bright and round and full outside. Wonders, then decides to go investigate, moving out of the kitchen and up the old stairs, everything around lit in shades of silver in the dark.

There are a lot of doors lining the staircase. Dipper knows he’s seen them before: GRADUATION, MABEL’S GOODBYE. Most of the doors are closed, except for one that reads COFFEE WITH BILL. That was from this morning, and Dipper can see himself, sitting at a tiny cafe table, making sickeningly obvious gooey eyes at Robbie’s weird friend. He closes the door quickly, feeling his cheeks flush hot despite the cool nighttime air.

Directly across from COFFEE WITH BILL is MEMORY PANIC!!! That door is boarded shut, and the wood looks new, the nails as shiny as the moon. Dipper runs his fingers along the grain, wondering what’s behind.

A voice says:

“I wouldn’t. More trouble that it’s worth.”

Dipper looks, up the stairs, to where one of the house’s strange yellow triangle windows is floating, holding a hammer in one ink-black hand and a bunch of nails in the other.

“Oh,” Dipper hears himself say. “I didn’t think anyone else was here.” Then feels like an idiot. Because  _of course_  the window is here. The windows are always here.

“Just me,” says the window, as if in confirmation. It has one big eye near its apex, just eight eyelashes and a black slit pupil. Dipper is struck by the strange feeling the window is missing something, but can’t place what he thinks it should be.

“Hey,” says the window. “Since you’re here, you wanna give a guy a hand?”

“Doing what?” Dipper asks, but the window is already floating away, further up the stairs.

Dipper follows it, up past more and more doors. THE LONG DRIVE, THE PHONECALL, THE OFFER. When they pass WORST. DATE. EVER., the window gestures with its hammer, “Every night he dreams his dick gets eaten by fireants.”

For some reason, the idea of the floating window saying “dick” startles Dipper, and he has to stifle a giggle.

“Jake wasn’t… He was okay,” he says.

“If Mr. I-Know-I’m-Gonna-Dump-Him-So-I’ll-Make-Him-Pay-First is ‘okay’, then you have one messed-up definition of ‘okay’.”

Dipper thinks of COFFEE WITH BILL and has to laugh. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s a family curse.”

The higher up the stairs they get, the more doors are boarded up. THE LOVE GOD, SOCIETY OF THE BLIND EYE, THE STANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. Eventually, the window stops next to a half-boarded door titled NOT WHAT HE SEEMS.

“You made a real mess of this one,” the window says. “Here.” It hands Dipper a piece of wood, the grain rough and splintery against his fingers.

“Do we really need to do this?” Dipper has a strange feeling they shouldn’t be. That not having these doors boarded is important somehow. That there’s something—

“Whoa!”

It’s an earthquake. Or something like it. A deep bass rumble, somewhere far below. It rattles the walls, sends the sparse lights flickering, knocks one of the old boards from the door labelled SOCK OPERA.

The window curses, the same language it was singing in before, and for a moment it flashes red and white. It’s just a moment, and when its pupil focuses on Dipper again, it’s back to its usual yellow-black.

“Careful,” it says. “You don’t want to be doing that. Especially not when we’re inside.”

“What  _was_  that?”

“Mindquake,” says the window. “Caused by— auurgh!” The last is a choked yelp, accompanied by the crash-tingle of hammer and nails hitting the floor as the window hunches in on itself, hands pressed against its sides at eye-height. Dipper can only think of someone covering their ears against an agonizing noise, but the only thing he can hear is a tiny chiming bell.

“Okay, okay, I get it. Less talky talky more worky worky,” the window grates out, and the bell stops. As soon as it does, the window sags, and for one moment Dipper thinks it’s going to fall. To hit the ground and shatter into a thousand little shards.

He lunges forward to stop it, grabbing the window by one little black arm, hauling it back into the air again. As he does, the feeling beneath his fingers is very, very strange. Like holding a two-dimensional sketch of a ten-dimensional thing, as black as the color between sleep and dream.

The window pulls back quickly, blinking up at Dipper with its huge, stylized eye, rubbing one hand against the part of its arm Dipper touched.

“Sorry,” Dipper says, uncertain whether what he did was allowed. He thinks of grabbing a goldfish, of finger oils stripping slime coats, burning tiny golden scales.

The window blinks. “Just get nailing,” it says. “The sooner we’re done here, the better.” It retrieves its hammer and its nails, Dipper picks up a board, and they get back to work.

They’ve nearly covered the door back over when Dipper realizes the thing that was bothering him before.

“What happened to you hat?” he says. “I liked that hat.”

“Yeah,” says the window. “So did I.” As it hammers one shiny silver nail, Dipper notices the thin bands of platinum triangles wrapped around each wrist.

* * *

In the morning, Dipper walks out of his great uncle’s house to find something’s dug half a tunnel underneath one of the porches in the night. He circles the property three times, but can’t find any other evidence of intrusion.

In the end, he fills in the hole, and doesn’t think any more about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBjQ9tuuTJQ)!


	3. Day 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to apologise in advance to any actual cryptographers reading this.
> 
> I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry.

Bill doesn’t manhandle him in the coffeeshop today, and Dipper has to tell himself he’s not disappointed. Actually, Bill doesn’t appear at all, contrary to previous statements. Dipper counts the number of times they’ve met and is just about ready to admit he has, once again, hit the Second Date Pines Curse, when he gets to the counter and the barista says:

“Mr. Pines? Mr. Cipher left this for you.”

The barista looks impossibly young, acne-dotted and squeak-voiced. He peers up at Dipper from behind the thick black-framed glasses everyone here wears as part of the uniform. Dipper is so distracted by the sight he doesn’t process what the kid has just said.

“Mr. Pines?”

“Huh?” Dipper blinks, is ready to say something about Mr. Pines being his great uncle, or his father, or anyone that isn’t him-surely he’s not old enough to be a “Mr.”, not yet-when the kid repeats:

“Mr. Cipher left this for you.” The kid holds out a coffee cup, expectant.

Dipper has one moment where he has no clue whatsoever who “Mr. Cipher” could be, before logic kicks in an he realizes it must be Bill.

“Oh,” he says, trying not to grin like too much of an idiot while he takes the cup. “Um. Thanks.”

“And this, too. Don’t forget this… whatever it is.” It’s a napkin, and the coffeecup has obviously been standing on it on the counter, given the faint damp ring. There’s writing all over the napkin, and Dipper has to laugh at the sight.

“It’s a cryptogram,” he tells the kid. “A cipher.”

“Okay, sure.” The squeak-voiced kid doesn’t seem impressed, but Dipper supposes there’s no accounting for other people’s fun. “You have a great day, man.”

Bill might not be here, but he bought Dipper and a coffee and left him a puzzle. As far as not-dates go, Dipper figures he’ll take it.

* * *

He takes two coffees and a bear claw, in fact, to work out the cipher. The symbols aren’t the same ones from yesterday-not the ones Dipper can read without trying-although they’re stylistically similar enough to have come from the same hand. Nor is the substitution as simple, and Dipper counts forty-eight different symbols, six-hundred and eighteen of them in total.

The solution turns out to be a variant on Diffie-Hellman, the keys small enough to be worked through manually. The extra symbols in the substitution, beyond the basic alphabet, are pictograms; a tiny representation of the star cluster for DIPPER, a little triangle with a dot in it for what Dipper assumes has to be BILL, something else that looks like three conjoined Qs that separates the main cyphertext from the padding.

The padding turns out to be lyrics from one of Dipper’s favorite songs by the Bad First Impressions. He can’t decide whether that’s cute, apologetic, or insulting. Still, if it’s supposed to be the latter, the rest of the message makes up for it. Or probably will. As soon as Dipper gets to Circle Park.

* * *

He only gets lost twice along the way, a fact which he’s proud of. It’s been a long time since he had to find this place. Dipper has vague memories of Robbie wanting to fight him here over Wendy once; something he finds amusing in retrospect, if only for the fact he has no recollection of anything coming of it.

Circle Park has had an upgrade since then, old wood and metal play equipment replaced colorful plastic, dirt traded out for a vast expanse of green-painted rubber. As promised by the cryptogram, Bill is there, hanging upside down from the monkey bars, eye closed and arms folded across his chest, tall enough that his hair nearly brushes the ground. There’s something long and black hanging from the bars next to him, and it takes Dipper a moment to realize it’s a cane.

“You know,” he says, by way of introduction, “I’m kind of insulted.”

Bill doesn’t open his eye. “Oh?”

“A two-bit key length? C’mon. Try harder next time. You know I do this for a living, right?”

Bill grins. “I thought I’d go easy on you,” he says. “Given you’re working without your computers.”

“I do  _quantum_  computing. That’s theoretical mathematics, man. They don’t actually exist.”

This does earn Dipper and opened eye, and a, “Not in Berkeley, anyway.” Then Bill is reaching up, swinging himself back down onto the rubber. He lands on one foot, before reaching up to grab the cane. His face, Dipper notices, is very flushed, and Dipper wonders how long he’s been hanging upside-down, waiting. Surely not the entire time Dipper was trying to work out his puzzle? But if Bill has any side-effects from his extended inverted stay, he doesn’t show it. Instead says: “Walk with me.” It’s not a question.

Bill, as it turns out, walks with a pretty heavy limp, hence the cane. Dipper hadn’t noticed it before but, he supposes, the first time they were together he was madly drunk, and the second they were mostly sitting.

“Let me guess,” he says, by way of conversation. “Hobbled after an encounter with the fearsome grizzlycorn?”

“Motorcycle accident,” Bill counters. “About two years ago. My second one in six months, the first body got totally trashed. I figured my benevolent overlord would just squeeze me out another one this time, too, but apparently not. Apparently I was ‘wasting clones’ and needed to learn the ‘fragility of human life’.” He makes air quotes as he says it, expression screwed up in a disgust that shows off his triangle-sharp teeth. Dipper has to give the guy points for keeping his mad story straight, if nothing else.

“Does it bother you? We don’t have to walk if it does?” He’s not sure how to do this. Should he fuss less? More? Is it better to be concerned or is that domineering?

“It’s fine. Did a lot of running around yesterday is all. Someone messed up at work, had to shift a bunch of stuff into storage to clean up.”

“I thought you worked as Gideon’s driver?” Dipper isn’t really sure what a driver does all day, but he suspects it involves a lot of driving.

“’Personal assistant’.” There are those air quotes again.

“What’s that like?” It’s not just smalltalk, Dipper finds he honestly wants to know. Curiosity over Bill, but over Gideon, as well. Gideon is so… prissy. Like a straight-laced TV preacher. It’s so diametrically opposite to what Dipper’s seen of Bill that he has to wonder how the two met.

Bill shrugs. “It is,” he says. “It pays the bills, as they say, pun intended.”

“You don’t sound like you love it?”

Bill’s quiet for a moment, just the clomp-click of his limping against the sidewalk. “I’ve got something else in the works,” he admits finally. “A side-project. A few more days, a week. Then I’m outta here.” He makes a whooshing noise and a gesture, like a plane taking off.

“Not a great fan of Gravity Falls?” Dipper knows the feeling.

“Used to travel a lot more,” Bill says. “Anywhere you can dream of, that’s where I was. Getting back to that, that’s the plan. But a few things to finish here, first. Some people I owe.” There’s an edge in his voice that suggests he doesn’t mean paying off debts, at least not of the kind Dipper’s used to. He has a sudden flash of white-on-red, of a huge pyramid, rearing up into a void.

The image is gone as soon as it comes, and Dipper lets it. He’s not in the mood for random symbolism, not this morning.

“Well,” he says instead. “I hope things work out. If there’s anything I can do to help…” It’s more a platitude than a serious offer, but it still earns Dipper a smile.

“Don’t worry,” Bill says. “You already are.”

* * *

They end up at a local museum. Dipper has some vague memory of coming here with his sister, way back when. Of sitting upside down on the benches, giggling as they invented conspiracy theories. Something about a lost president and an imagined town founder, a way to cheer Mabel up back when Pacifica was more enemy than friend.

As an adult, the museum is much more staid and also surprisingly interesting, as far as small town history goes. Part of this, of course, is due to Bill, who seems to know an awful lot about a place he professes not to like. Half his stories are lies, because it’s Bill who’s telling them, but they make Dipper laugh. Laugh, and ache for the presence of his sister. She’d love this. She’d love Bill, at least Dipper hopes she will, and the thought sits heavy and unexamined in his mind. Filed under TOO SOON, BUT MAYBE.

They wander around until lunchtime, then wander into that, too. A little taco place next to the museum, unmemorable and unimportant except in its proximity.

Dipper has a craving for nachos, but orders a burrito instead. Bill orders salad, no meat, no dressing, and sits down to eat it with exactly the expression Dipper considers to be appropriate for the food.

“So you do eat,” he says. “I was beginning to wonder.”

“When I have to.” Bill gives his lettuce a sharp-toothed sneer.

“When you ‘have to’?” Dipper’s relationship with food can be summed up by the flab around his middle. Bill, meanwhile, is thin enough that calling him three dimensional might be pushing things half a dimension too far.

“It’s so… disgusting,” Bill snarls, chewing his lettuce like he resents every bite. “Going in and coming out. What a filthy way to exist.”

Dipper is pretty sure that sort of attitude is the thing they have after school specials about. “I guess you get used to it,” he says, thinking about cloning tanks and his own burrito which, while nothing to write Yelp reviews about, is perfectly serviceable.

“Urgh,” Bill says. “The day I get used to this revolting…  _consumption_  is the day I know I’ve given up.”

“Given up what, exactly?”

Bill looks at Dipper, eye narrowed. It’s not quite a hostile look, but it is certainly… appraising. Whatever the assessment criteria is, Dipper must pass it, because Bill says: “Going home.”

Scratch crazy, Dipper’s starting to think maybe Bill’s in some sort of cult. One of the ones that believe aliens are going to swoop down at any moment, sucking the faithful from their physical forms and returning them to the Divine Mothership in the sky. He wonders what he should do with the suspicion. He doesn’t know Bill well enough to stage some sort of intervention. Maybe he should find a way to bring it up with Robbie? Or Gideon?

He’ll think about it later. For now, he talks about meal replacement startups and losing his hat in the bay the time he tried to take his parents across the Golden Gate Bridge. Then Bill makes the, possibly calculated, mistake of asking about his work, and Dipper goes off on such a tangent about qubits and Shor’s algorithm and information-theoretically secure cryptosystems that suddenly an hour’s gone by.

“Wow,” he says when he realizes, self-conscious and hoping the heat in his cheeks isn’t visible. “I’m sorry. This is probably really boring for you.”

“Why would I find it boring?”

“Most people do,” Dipper says, because it’s true. 

“Most people must find themselves insufferable, then,” says Bill. Then, after a moment’s consideration, adds, “Which they do, incidentally.”

Dipper is proud that he thinks carefully about his response before saying, “You seem to have sort of a negative outlook on humanity?” Because he doesn’t want to hurt Bill, or put him off, but Dipper doesn’t think he’s ever met anyone with such a dreary view on the subject. And that includes his great uncle Stan, a man not known for his philanthropy.

The shark-tooth grin is back. “’Nasty, brutish, and short’,” Bill says. Dipper knows it’s a quote, even if he doesn’t know the origins. “The human appetite for power is second only to the appetite to use that power for the exploitation of others.”

“Maybe sometimes. But I think people are better than that. I think people can  _be_  better than that.”

Bill looks at him as if he’s just insisted triangles have four sides. “Your research,” he says. “Why do you do it?”

It’s such a tangent, Dipper blinks. “The crypto? Uh, because I… it’s fun, I guess? I’ve always enjoyed solving puzzles.”

Bill nods, his eye narrowing. It’s got a nasty glint in it. Something gold and sharp. “For the knowledge,” Bill says. It’s not exactly a question, but Dipper answers anyway.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Is that all?”

Dipper feels like he’s being walked backwards towards a cliff. “I… Why?”

“Quantum cryptography,” Bill says. “It’s not exactly puzzles on coffeecups, is it? The applications are a little more… practical that that.”

“I—”“It’s an arms race,” Bill continues. “The first quantum computer versus the first perfect algorithm. Control the first, and you control the world. Control the second, and you can hide anything.”

The thing is, it’s not like Bill’s wrong. Quantum computers don’t exist, at least not in any form that counts. But they’re coming, everyone knows it. A decade, maybe less, until the world sees the birth of the first machine that makes all machines before it look like abacuses. And Dipper’s research? For now, it’s all theoretical. For now. Until that computer exists, and someone feeds it the work Dipper’s done—the work Dipper will do—and is able to solve every single cipher in the space it takes an eye to blink.

“How many wars,” Bill says, “do you think will start once no door in the world can stay barred? When no secrets can remain hidden?”

Three straight lines and a circle, a world split down the center, a floating hole in reality itself.

“There is no knowledge without power.” Bill’s leaning across the table, black fingers splayed on the plastic, tie in danger of falling into his half-eaten salad. “So. Tell me: why do you do it?”

Bill’s eye burns like the heart of a supernova, torn pupil bleeding void into the world. Dipper can’t meet it, looks down, to where his own hands sit uneasy on the table. It’s not like he doesn’t know the implications of his passion, not like he’s never considered it at three a.m. when sleep won’t come. It’s just that he doesn’t, not if he can help it.

There’s no answer, not really. Just a question mark, careening in a storm, jumbled letters spinning underneath.

Eventually, Dipper says: “Dude. That’s… that’s heavy, man.”

A pause. Then the creak of Bill, leaning back in his chair.

“Yeah,” he says. “Well. You’re not twelve anymore, Pine Tree. Things catch up.”

* * *

Defying all market logic, Gravity Falls still has a video game arcade. Dipper is only moderately surprised to find it attached to a novelty bar filled with disaffected twenty- and thirty-somethings, drinking overpriced game-themed cocktails while flailing at  _Dancy Pants Revolution_.

Dipper spends the afternoon introducing Bill to  _Fight Fighters Xtreme_ , which the latter is hilariously, spectacularly bad at. He’s also quite possibly the sorest and most persistent loser in the entire multiverse, so Dipper switches them from versus to tag team, which doesn’t help so much as it deflects Bill’s anger from Dipper and onto the arcade machine itself.

It occurs to Dipper, somewhere between the sixth and seventh round, that this is the longest date he’s ever been on, assuming it is a date, which it might not be. It’s not like Bill’s done anything particularly date-like, and Dipper doesn’t know how to ask the question on the off-chance he’s got everything mixed up. Maybe Bill’s just here out of some kind of weird obligation. To Robbie, perhaps. Or Gideon. Maybe he’s here to babysit, lest Dipper… what, exactly? Melt into a puddle of grieving over his great uncle? Dipper tries to check, to catch Bill’s expression in some unguarded moment. But he’s standing on Bill’s blind side, and the guy is hard to read when Dipper can’t see his eye.

Still. Their positioning makes Dipper bolder in his staring. Bill really is kind of cute when he’s screaming obscenities at the oblivious polygons of Rumble McSkirmish.

The afternoon is old and lazy by the time Dipper hears his name, and turns to find Robbie winding his way over. He’s still in his work clothes, jacket slung over one shoulder.

“Oh man,” he says. “You made Eyeball play  _Fight Fighters_. I’m surprised this place isn’t on fire yet.”

Bill is too busy having a stare-off with N-Buffalo to rise the taunt.

“Hey,” Robbie adds, suddenly serious. “About yesterday…”

Dipper blinks. “Yesterday?”

“At the funeral home…?” Robbie starts, but trails off when he gets nothing from Dipper’s expression. There’s a moment, heavy and awkward, broken only by the sound of Bill hammering buttons. Then Robbie seems to make a decision, smiles a strained smile, and gives Dipper a playful punch on the shoulder. “When you and Maybe-baby are ready to come down, give me a call,” he says. Then, more seriously, “Your great uncle’s in good hands until you’re ready.”

“Thanks, man,” says Dipper, and means it. He supposes knowing the local funeral director is useful, if morbid and, hopefully, infrequently required.

“Got the death certificate, too,” Robbie adds. “That one you can grab whenever.”

The words  _death certificate_  sound horrifyingly final, but Dipper has a lawyer to see tomorrow and he tells Robbie he’ll be around beforehand. Then they prise Bill away from  _Fight Fighters_  before he can do serious damage to either it or himself, and retire to the lounge area. Dipper says nothing when Bill throws his arm over the back of the couch, right behind Dipper’s neck. He’s on Bill’s blind side again, so has no idea what the guy’s thinking, but Bill doesn’t move when Dipper lolls his head backwards across that lean black forearm.

It’s warm, that forearm, the skin firm and smooth against the nape of Dipper’s neck. He wants to study that skin, to know how it feels, how it tastes. He’s been with guys with tats before-living in California, of course he has-but never such a big expanse of solid black. He wants to know how it works, how it was done, how long it took. Wants to know what Bill’s nail beds look like, underneath the polish. Is he tattooed there, too? And, if so,  _how_?

Also, hadn’t Bill mentioned he’d had his legs done as well? Up to the thigh. And Dipper thinks he really, really shouldn’t be thinking about Bill’s thighs. At least, not in front of Robbie and the purple haired girl behind the bar. Maybe not in front of Bill, either. At least, not yet.

So. Change of topic.

“I was supposed to be cleaning up the house today,” he tells no one in particular. Adult responsibility. As far as buzzkills go, it works just fine.

“That’s a hell of a job to do alone.” Robbie, the voice of experience on all things death.

“Tell me about it. There’s so much junk in that place.”

“What’re you gonna do with it? The Mystery Shack, I mean.”

Dipper considers this for a moment. Then admits, “Sell it, if Mabel will let me.”

“Yeah, really?” Robbie sounds genuinely curious. “Who would buy it?”

“Gideon.” This from Bill, spat out like a thirsty man wasting water in a desert. Dipper feels the tendons flex beneath his neck, like Bill is curling his fingers into a fist.

“Lil’ Mountebank? No way. Seriously?”

Dipper looks to Bill, who doesn’t return the gesture, just scowls into the distance. “He said the place is important,” Dipper says. “To Gravity Falls.”

“No way,” Robbie repeats. Then, after a moment, “Well, I mean. I guess, but-“

“I need to piss.” This from Bill, who’s suddenly standing up. He stalks off before anyone can suggest otherwise. 

When he vanishes, Dipper starts with, “Um…” before Robbie cuts him off with a wave.

“Don’t worry about it, man. He gets like that sometimes. He’ll be fine.”

Dipper still watches as Bill vanishes around behind the bar, cane slamming little circular indents into the floorboards. 

“How… how do you two know each other?” he asks when they’re alone. 

Robbie just shrugs. “Started seeing him around town a few years back, working for Gleeful. He’s such a prickly, freaky little shit, no one would go near him. Tough life in a small town. Eventually, Tambry dared me to buy him a drink. He refused, because he’s Bill, but he didn’t tell us to get lost, either.” A pause. “He’s okay once you get used to him.”

Dipper nods. “Yeah. Yeah, I get that.”

“He totally wants to bone you, too. Just… for the record. I mean, if you’re gonna be weird about that, consider this the head’s up.”

Dipper is glad he’s not drinking in the exact moment Robbie says this, because otherwise he’d be needing a new shirt. As it is, he just splutters and coughs and blushes red down to his socks. 

“Oh, gee. I, I… Ah. Um. No. No I, ah. I won’t be. Weird about that.”

Robbie looks at Dipper long and hard, but eventually just snorts. “Yeah, right Pines,” he says. “As if you know how to be anything else.” But he’s smiling.

* * *

Bill is gone for a long time. A lot longer, in Dipper’s opinion, that it should take one man to take a leak. He asks Robbie if they should go check if Bill’s okay, but Robbie just shakes his head.

“Nah. He’ll be brooding in a corner somewhere. Just leave him. He’ll come back when he’s ready.”

Dipper’s not convinced this is for the best, but goes along with it anyway, chatting to Robbie until the drinks run out and the  _Dancy Pants_  machine is free. Then they stumble around on that for a while, which degenerates into shoving and laughing once Robbie turns out to be pretty decent at the game.

“Too much time spent with Thompson,” Robbie confesses, even as he’s hanging onto one pink bar, feet mashing arrows while Dipper tries in vain to push him off the platform. (They’d decided stomping on each other’s arrows would be cheating. Dipper honors this, having grown up with a sibling and thus knowing the importance of ground rules.)

Dipper flunks out horribly, Robbie manages a C, and the machine scolds them for their performance. While they’re busy laughing about it, Dipper feels strong hands land on his shoulders, feels the sharp sting of pressure against the bruises from the other day.

“Ow, what-“

“Time to go,” says Bill, spinning Dipper around and forcibly marching him off the machine.

“What? Where?”

“You have dinner,” Bill announces. “With the Northwest-Gleefuls.”

“I do?”

“Yeah.”

“Since when?”

“This morning.”

“This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

“Yeah. Forgot to mention it before. Oops.”

Dipper considers resisting, but he also considers Gideon and Pacifica and figures it’s not like he has anything better to do. So he waves goodbye to Robbie, who’s laughing at him and at Bill, but not in a mean sort of way.

Bill marches Dipper the whole way out of the arcade, to where Dipper’s car waits for him just outside. “Wait. That’s my-“

A black-fingered hand lifts from his shoulder, and reappears a moment later dangling his own keys in front of his face.

“I-“

“Lifted them out of your pocket at the arcade,” says Bill. When Dipper spins to face him, he looks entirely unapologetic. Instead just says, “Off you go.”

There’s a lecture lined up behind Dipper’s tongue about  _what the hell, man?_  and  _boundaries, Bill!_  but in the end all that comes out is a sigh. Also, Bill had his hand in Dipper’s pocket. Again. That’s something else Dipper is going to think about later. When he’s not standing in the middle of the street.

He takes the keys.

“You have fun,” Bill says, all faux cheer and exaggerated finger-waving.

“You’re not coming?” Dipper says, before he can stop himself. It’s not like he hasn’t spent the entire day monopolizing Bill’s time. He hopes the sneering expression Bill’s making is more at the thought of having dinner with his boss, and less at the thought of spending more time with Dipper.

Just in case, Dipper adds. “I, uh. I had fun today. A lot of fun. Thank you.” He thinks that, somewhere, in some other universe, there’s a version of Dipper that leans forward for a kiss right about now. Somewhere. Not here. Instead, he just stands sort of awkward, rocking back and forth on his heels, feeling like the last decade didn’t happen.

“I know,” says Bill, because he’s Bill. “Tell me that again in a week, and we’ll talk. See you round, Pine Tree.” The he’s gone, vanished back inside the arcade, before Dipper can wonder what he means.

* * *

Northwest Manor is still ostentatious and intimidating, but the gates open at Dipper’s approach and a valet takes his car away to park without so much as a sneer. Dipper has a moment to wonder if he’s under-dressed, still in his ratty jeans and the shirt he’s been sweating in all afternoon. But neither Gideon nor Pacifica seem to mind, even though they themselves look fresh from a photo shoot for designer sportswear. Dipper accepts a handshake from the former and a kiss on the cheek from the latter, and everyone is smiles and welcome and it’s fine.

Dinner is, once again, relaxed. No intimidating tables the length of a room, no six dozen forks. The Northwest-Gleefuls obviously have a chef, and though the food looks like something from a magazine, Dipper recognizes most of the ingredients and the taste reminds him of his parents taking him out for dinner at the end of his first year at Berkeley. The first year he’d been separated from Mabel.

There’s wine, and Gideon spends a good twenty minutes giving Dipper lessons on how to drink it. Not in a snotty way. Just a straightforward explaining of things like the difference between varietal and  _terroir_ , of Old World versus New World. At the end of it, Dipper feels like he’s acquired a new skill. And the wine is pretty good.

And then, somewhere between the third course and the fourth, Pacifica says: “I hear you’ve been spending a lot of time with Bill since you got here.”

Dipper has a sudden stab of panic. He’s not in California any more, Toto, and there are a lot of ways that question could go. “Um,” he says. “Yeah. A bit?”

But all Pacifica does is smile, big and bright and beautiful. “I’m glad,” she says. “It’ll be good for him. I worry he doesn’t get out enough, spends too much time in his own head.”

“Um…” says Dipper.

“Bill came to us a while back,” Gideon adds, voice paternal and kind. “Not from a good place, you understand. We’ve done our best for him, given him a home, a job, but…” He trails off, shares a look with his wife.

“He’s had a… troubled life,” Pacifica says. “He finds it difficult to relate to people and, to put it bluntly, he needs a friend.”

“He has Robbie,” Dipper says, because Robbie’s been nothing but nice to him since he came back, and he feels obliged to defend the man’s honor.

“Of course,” Pacifica says. “But Robbie has Tambry, and… well. You know what I mean, right?”

“I guess,” says Dipper. He’s starting to suspect Pacifica said “friend” when she really meant something else. It’s not that he minds, but he could do without the blushing. He also refrains from mentioning the fact he’s only here for another week or so. Actually, he’s starting to refrain from even thinking about that. It’s not that he wants to stay, but…

“Anyway,” Gideon says, voice bright and drawl thick. “We just wanted you to know. All we want from Bill is for him to be happy. Anything that helps with that is all right by us.” He raises his glass. “To happiness,” he says.

“To happiness,” Pacifica echoes.

Dipper smiles. “Sure,” he says. “To happiness.” There are certainly worse goals in life.

* * *

Much later.

The forest air is cool against his skin, dirt and loam damp beneath his bare feet. He’s in his boxers and nothing else. Walking though the moon-silvered trees, towards a bright golden glow that burns at the forest’s core. It’s hot, that glow. Hot and vibrant, in the way the rest of this place isn’t. A beacon in this world of half-remembered ghosts and misplaced dreams.

When he gets to the clearing, he has to shield his eyes. The burn is so bright here, the heat so smothering. One huge pine tree, reaching up into the heavens, fire devouring every branch.

The little yellow window is here, too, watching the blaze with its single staring eye. It looks like it’s sitting on a fallen log, but is actually floating slightly above. Dipper tries to remember if he’s ever seen it touch the ground.

He sits next to it, and for a long time there’s silence. Just the two of them, watching the tree burn. The fire doesn’t seem in danger of spreading to the rest of the forest, which Dipper is grateful for. He thinks it would be a very, very bad thing, for that fire to spread. He wonders if he should do something in case it does.

He decides to ask the window for its opinion. “Should we, like. Do something about that, maybe? The fire, I mean.”

The window doesn’t turn. Which is weird, because the angle means Dipper’s on its “thin” side. It really is only two-dimensional, even if Dipper thinks he can sometimes catch a glimpse of eight others, folded up tight inside its lines. “Not much to do,” it says. “Things have already started.” Its voice is sort of familiar, but sort of not. Kind of like someone he knows imitating someone he doesn’t.

“Oh,” he says.

There’s silence for a while, just a guy and his two-dimensional metaphor enjoying a bonfire. Then the window says, “So you had fun today, huh?”

Because this is a dream, and time never works quite right in dreams, it takes Dipper a moment to remember what the window’s talking about. When he does, he smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, it was great.” There’s a warmth in his chest that has nothing to do with the fire.

The window nods, which is an impressive feat for something with neither a head nor a neck. Dipper thinks maybe it doesn’t actually nod so much as give the impression of nodding, in the same way it’s less a floating eye-window and more the impression of one. Either way, it says, “Enjoy the fun while it lasts.”

Dipper scowls. “Yeah, I guess. I have to leave soon.” Once Mabel is here and the house is settled and the funeral is done. Then it’s back to his regular life.

“Leaving’s the least of your problems,” the window says, then flinches. Somewhere, far away, Dipper thinks he hears the brief ringing of a bell.

Dipper thinks about the window’s words for a long time. Then: “People keep saying things like that. Keep implying I’m in some kind of danger.”

“Do they?” The window asks it, but Dipper gets the feeling it isn’t really a question. His mind feels like molten peanut brittle but he knows there’s something down below. Some truth he can’t quite reach, preserved and waiting.

“Bill…” he starts. “Bill told me… he told me not to sleep outside the Shack.”

The window says nothing, but Dipper notices its little black hands are balled into little black fists. Somewhere in the distance, the bell is ringing again.

“So I don’t,” Dipper continues. “And whenever I dream, you’re here.”

“Pine Tree…”

“I think… I think people are right. I think there is something dangerous out there. I think I’ve always known that, even when I don’t remember it. I think it can get into my head. I think it’s  _been_  getting into my head. But I think it can’t when I’m at the Shack. And I think… I think that’s because of you. You’re protecting me.” He pauses, then feels he needs to clear something up. “I know you’re not actually a floating window with arms. It’s just easier for me to think you are than to see what you actually look like. And that’s okay. I mean, I don’t… I just wanted to say thank you. For protecting me. Because you are… right?” Somewhere, dimly, Dipper is aware the bell has stopped ringing.

The window-that-isn’t does turn to look at him, then. “Yeah,” is says, voice as bright as its color. “Sure am, buddy! You got it in one!” And the pupil in its eye flashes, long slit flickering symbols before it re-settles into its normal shape.

Dipper knows those symbols. They’re from Bill’s cipher this morning, nothing so complex this time, just letters:

N.

O.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On the other hand, sorry-not-sorry for [music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NqzdPVjGdM)!


	4. Day 5 (and 6)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, I'd like to apologise with anyone with a relative who's died in the state of Oregon, for my taking liberties with the process. oTZ
> 
> Oh, and also there's a brief mention of some past (voluntary) bodymod stuff that some people might find squicky. Sorry 'bout that. u_u

“So-oo-oo… How’s hanging out with Ro-oo-obbie?”

Dipper laughs at the teasing whine in his sister’s voice, audible even over the coffeeshop’s early morning din. “How do you know about that?”

“Tambry’s Facebook. She’s been tagging you.”

“We went for drinks,” Dipper says. “And played  _Fight Fighters_. You know the arcade here has a bar in it, now?”

“Of course!” Mabel says, as if this is the most rational and logical thing in the world. “All the kids from the 80s got oo-oo-old.” Then, while Dipper is still laughing, “But seriously Dipper I’m proud of you. You used to hate Robbie’s guts.”

“I guess. But it was a long time ago. People change. I had dinner with Gideon, too.”

If Dipper’s expecting a similar reaction to this than he gets to the news about Robbie, he’s disappointed. “… Gideon?” Even though he can’t see her, Dipper knows exactly the expression his sister is making when she says it.

He shifts the phone to the his other hand, fumbling with the cash he needs to pay yet another pimple-faced kid for his coffee. “Yeah, you remember Gideon, right?”

“Dipper, of  _course_  I remember Gideon. The question is whether  _you_  remember Gideon.”

The tone makes him scowl. “What do you mean?”

“Dipper…” It’s That Tone, again. The one Mabel gets when there’s something she thinks he should remember. Should, but doesn’t.

Dipper doesn’t deign to remind her that the last time they had any exposure to Gideon Gleeful he’d barely made it to double digits. Dipper refuses to believe there’s anything in the world a ten year-old-child could do that would warrant his sister holding a decade-long grudge.

Which is why he says, “He’s married to Pacifica, you know.”

“ _What_?” The screech is loud enough that he has to hold the phone away from his head. “When? Pacifica’s not old enough to be married! Why didn’t she say something?”

“Probably because she knew you’d react like this,” Dipper mutters, half into his coffee. He spies a table, right near the door, and heads for it. It’s early, very early, and Dipper’s the first person into the cafe. The first person waiting out the front before it opened, in fact.

“Dipper,” Mabel is saying. “You have to save her.”

“Who?”

“Pacifica! Gideon’s doing something to her. I just know it!”

“Mabel.”

“Like… he must be controlling her mind.”

“Mabel, no.”

“Mabel yes. It’s mind control, Dipper. I just know it. Gideon is using his psychic powers to trap Pacifica into a horrible, loveless marriage. For her money! He’s after her money, Dipper! This is not okay! You can’t allow it.”

Mabel sounds near hysterics, but Dipper’s had enough. “Mabel! Would you just listen to yourself for a moment?” He’s suddenly glad there’s no one else around. No one except for the two baristas, currently watching him with bright-eyed interest. Dipper turns himself away, lowers his voice and hisses, “What is  _wrong_  with you? Why are you saying these things?”

“Dipper, listen—”

“No, Mabel. You listen. I don’t know what you think happened the last time we were here, but we were  _children_ , Mabel. Children. And now we’re not. And it’s time to grow. Up.”

“Dipper!”

“You’ve got to let it go, Mabel. Whatever you think it is. Because if you get here, and—” And then the the little bell on the door chimes, and when Dipper looks up, he sees who he wants to see. Shit. “And I have to go,” he finishes.

“Wait, no, Dipper—”“I have a date,” he snaps. He doesn’t mean to say it, and certainly doesn’t mean to say it so angrily, but there it is and, yes, Bill has heard it. Crap. “I’ll talk to you later.” He smacks the phone’s disconnect button to the sound of his sister’s shrieking.

By the time Bill sits down across from him, Dipper’s thrown the phone onto the table in disgust, is banging his forehead against the wood, head buried under his arms.

Bill watches him for a while, or Dipper assumes he does. Then he says:

“‘Date’?”

Dipper’s too pissed off to be embarrassed, so he just looks up, glares, and snaps, “Isn’t it?”

Bill shrugs, and his eye won’t meet Dipper’s. “If you like.”

Someone spare him. “Bill,” he says. “I’m not in the mood. Not this morning.”

“Suit yourself.” And then, of all things, Bill is standing up.

Dipper watches him walk all the way out of the coffeeshop before he remembers Pacifica’s words.  _He finds it difficult to relate to people._

“Shit.” And then Dipper’s standing, as well. Up and out onto the street. “Bill. Wait.”

Dipper’s not sure if it will work, but it does, Bill stopping and half-turning to regard Dipper with his single gleaming eye.

Dipper closes the distance between them in a jog, then: “Look. I’m sorry. I’m not… I’m mad at my sister, not at you.”

“I know,” says Bill.

“You… know?” This earns him no response, just a long, inscrutable stare. Dipper has no idea what’s going on behind the eyepatch, whether Bill’s angry or upset or just confused. “Argh,” he says. “This was not how this morning was supposed to go.”

“How was it supposed to go?”

Dipper opens his mouth, is about to explain, when he has a better idea.

“How ‘bout a do-over?” he suggests. “We both pretend this didn’t happen, I go back inside, then you come in, and we try again?”

One awful heartbeat, then another. Then Bill grins, one neat white zig-zag. And he holds his hand up against his temple, black fingers miming the shape of a gun. “It’s a deal,” he says. And pulls the trigger.

* * *

This time, Dipper makes sure he’s sitting in the coolest possible manner—relaxed and suave—when Bill walks in. Then decides, what the hey, and stands when Bill approaches. Then it’s a touch on the guy’s elbow, and Dipper is leaning forward for a kiss. Just light and chaste and on the cheek, over as soon as it starts. Bill grins his triangle grin in response, which Dipper returns with something he knows is softer and a dozen times goofier. But he can’t help it. Bill said this could be a date if that’s what Dipper wanted. Dipper does want, and so will have. When they sit, he reaches across the table, lacing Bill’s fingers in his own. The skin feels exactly like skin, despite all the ink. Dipper notices a little chip in the polish on Bill index finger, and the glimpse of grey underneath starts him giggling. He can’t stop, even when Bill glares at him with a, “What?” 

Dipper runs his thumb across the chip, over and over. “I’ve been wondering,” he says by way of explanation, “whether your tattoos went under your fingernails.”

“They do.”

“ _How_?”

Bill tilts his head, the gesture oddly bird-like. “Most people don’t want to know the answer,” he says. “Once they’ve thought of the possibilities.”

Dipper is still giggling, despite the squeamishness. “You pulled them all out and got someone to ink the nail beds before they grew back.” Then, at Bill’s nod, “Dude! That’s… oh man. I don’t know if that’s hardcore awesome or disgusting.” Then, a thought, “Did you do it to your toenails as well?”

“Just the fingers,” Bill says. “They took a long time to heal. Gideon banned me from doing more.”

“Not that I’m encouraging you,” Dipper says, because he really isn’t. “But it’s your body. If you want to do weird, gross, painful things to it, I don’t see how that’s Gideon’s business.”

“Then maybe you should tell him that.” Bill is staring across the table, his torn-pupil eye watching Dipper like Dipper is the only piece of color in an otherwise lifeless universe. His fingers are still under Dipper’s, not returning the touch, but he’s not moving away, either.

* * *

Their second try goes much smoother than the first. Asides from the hand-holding, Dipper even manages to convince Bill to try some croissant. Bill is not impressed—“It tastes like rancid butter”—but Dipper gets the suspicion some of the vehemence may be for show.

Afterwards, they wander around, aimless, watching the town wake up. Still holding hands like teenagers, Bill glaring down anyone who dares to look at them twice.

Robbie, Dippper thinks, was right: people really are scared of Bill, gasping and darting away when his eye meets theirs. It’s a thought Dipper will file away for later.

For now, they just chat, Bill’s standoffishness from earlier evaporating in the dawn. It’s halfway through a story about the Town Hall, Bill mimicking Bud Gleeful’s voice in the a sneering, sarcastic sort of way, that something clicks in Dipper’s mind and he bursts into laughter. This derails Bill, and earns Dipper another snapped, “What?”—Bill does not like being laughed at, Dipper is beginning to realize—so he holds his hands up placatingly.

“It’s not you,” he says. “Well, I mean. It kind of is, but… I’ve been having these weird dreams, lately.”

“Uh-huh, ‘weird dreams’, nice opening.”

“Not like that!” Dipper punches Bill on the arm, light and playful. “Like, actual weird dreams. I keep thinking one of the windows in great uncle Stan’s house is talking to me.”

“One of the… windows?”

“I don’t know if you’ve been in that place—”“Once or twice.”

“Right, well. Apparently, Stan had some kind of obsession with the Eye of Providence. You know, the pyramid thing on the money? Well, it’s all over the house.”

“Maybe your great uncle was in the Illuminati,” Bill suggests.

“You know, I’ve wondered, but I doubt it. I think maybe he just wanted people to  _think_  he was. Good for business. But anyway, the point is, there are all these triangular stained glass windows in the house, and I keep dreaming one is talking to me. And it has this  _really_  irritating voice for some reason—”“I— Wait. What?”

“—Which, it’s like a dream, right? So I don’t know how I know it’s irritating, except it is. And anyway. That voice you were doing just now reminded me of it.” A pause, then: “Sorry.” But he’s giggling again. He can’t help it.

Bill neither looks nor sounds impressed with Dipper’s revelation. “I remind you of the ‘annoying window’ in your dreams?”

“The  _window’s_  not annoying,” Dipper says, because Bill is looking put out and he feels he should clarify. “It just  _sounds_  annoying. Kind of like… like David Lynch on speed.”

“You aren’t making this better, Pine Tree.”

And then Dipper is laughing again, because he’s heard it once and now he can’t un-hear it. “Yes,” he says. “Like that.”

“Pine Tree…”

“’Pine Tree’…” Dipper imitates, sending his voice as far back into his sinuses as he can. “Oh man,” he says. “Man, I just realized my subconscious sounds like you when you’re mad. That’s so messed up. I’m sorry.”

“I’m never speaking to you again.” Bill looks like he wants to cross his arms and storm off in a huff, but he can’t, because Dipper is still holding his hand. Holding it, and not letting go.

“Aw, don’t be like that,” he says. And this time he gets his other arm in on the action, wrapping it around Bill’s chest, drawing him closer. “I’m sorry. I think you have a beautiful voice.” Bill is too thin beneath Dipper’s arm. Too thin and too warm and too perfect. Dipper never wants to let him go. “The most beautiful. You could lure men to their deaths with your voice.”

That, at last, earns Dipper the edge of a grin. “Could,” Bill says, “and has.” Then he lifts his other hand, fingers lightly touching Dipper’s forearm, and everything is perfect.

* * *

Sadly, Dipper has to see the lawyer about his great uncle’s estate, which means he can’t spend today goofing off with Bill. Still, the latter walks him to the lawyer’s office, and they stand outside for far too long, holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes—or rather, eye—like lovesick teenagers.

When Dipper goes to kiss Bill goodbye, the latter doesn’t pull away. He does, in fact, part his lips. Just a little, just enough for Dipper to feel the press of sharp teeth against his tongue.

As far as distracting goodbyes go, it’s right up there, and Dipper is not looking forward to the rest of the morning. So he says, “I’m free this afternoon. You wanna do something?”

“Yes,” says Bill. Then: “Like what?” If his voice sounds pitched self-consciously lower than normal, Dipper doesn’t notice. He’s too busy feeling hot and fluttery over the order of those sentences. Like Bill is more interested in who he’s with than what he’ll be doing. 

Of course, having made the invitation, Dipper now has to think of something for them to do. So he blurts out something about the cinema, even though he has no idea what’s playing or when. Bill agrees so readily Dipper wants to kiss him again, and does so, and it’s just as world tilting and amazing as the first time.

“This afternoon,” Bill says, his breath ghosting across Dipper’s cheek. “I’ll be waiting.”

* * *

The lawyer is not as exciting as the memory of kissing Bill, which is why Dipper spends more time thinking of the former than listening to the other.

Dipper already knows most of it, like the split between himself and Mabel. He is, however, surprised to learn fact that Stan Pines apparently died owing nothing to anyone, institution or individual.

And then there’s the size of the estate Stan left behind.

“He…  _how_  much?”

The lawyer repeats the number.

“Wow,” Dipper says after a while. Then: “Wow.”

* * *

Afterwards, Dipper considers calling his sister to tell her they are, for all intents and purposes, now independently wealthy. Considers it, but doesn’t, largely because he’s still annoyed about earlier.

Stan’s money—their money now, Dipper supposes—isn’t in cash. It’s in investments and commodities and, of all things, registered patents, the interest funneled through a complicated system of companies and trusts. Not Northwest-levels of rich, but certainly enough, for someone to, for example, make a comfortable life for themselves while living in a cabin in the woods.

“Wow, Pines. You’re actually living the dead relative dream.” This from Robbie. He’s the first person Dipper sees after stumbling out of the lawyer’s, three hours after walking in.

Today, it’s Robbie Robbie, all tight jeans and faded hoodie. He’s technically working, but not front-of-house stuff. Just pouring over gravesite logistics and embalming products or whatever it is funeral directors do when it’s not consoling the grief-stricken.

Today, Dipper is too shell-shocked to worry about something as fleeting as grief.

“He was rich, man,” he keeps saying. “Rich.” He doesn’t understand why, that being the case, Stan would be living here in Oregon’s armpit, shilling junk to the gullible. Or why he’d leave everything to a great-niece and -nephew he barely knew.

“Tourist business is good business, I guess,” says Robbie. He’s rummaging through the piles of paper on his desk, eventually emerging with an “a-hah!” and brandishing a piece of paper.

“Here you go, man.”

It’s Stan’s death certificate. Dipper looks at it, wondering if he’s supposed to feel something and why he isn’t.

“You okay?” From Robbie. When Dipper looks up, he finds he’s being regarded carefully from beneath too-long black bangs.

Dipper takes a deep breath. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I…” And then stops.

“Dipper?”

Dipper blinks, scowls, blinks again, starts with, “It’s…” Then reconsiders, “No. No, it’s probably nothing.”

“Dude,” says Robbie. “You know that’s, like, kinda a big deal piece of paper you got there. If it’s not right, I gotta know.”

“It’s just…” Now that he’s started talking, Dipper isn’t sure he’s remembering things right. But: “This says ‘Stanford Pines’.”

“Yeah…?” Robbie, obviously not sure where this is going.

“That’s not Stan.” He thinks for a moment, then, “Well, it is. But not the right Stan.”

“There were two Stans?”

It sounds crazy, now that Dipper’s saying it out loud, but he’s  _sure_  that it’s true. “They were twins,” he says. “Stanley and Stanford. We called Stanford Pines ‘great uncle Ford’. He died…” Dipper can’t finish that sentence, because it occurs to him he doesn’t  _know_. He’s sure he had two great uncles; can even remember both of them, Stan in his suit and fez, Ford in a long tan coat. They played  _Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons_ , and Ford showed him a d-infinity and… and that couldn’t be right.

“Lemmie have a look,” Robbie says, throwing himself down in the chair behind his computer. There’s typing, but Dipper is too busy thinking about Princess Unattainabelle and an octopus with one eye and a mouth full of little triangular teeth.

The piece of paper in Dipper’s hand lists the cause of death. Auto accident, most likely fatigue-induced.

“Ah, here.”

Dipper looks up, to where Robbie is swinging his monitor around to show off whatever he’s found. “Stanley Pines died in a car accident, back when leg warmers were still in style.”

“A… car accident?” Dipper looks down at the certificate, then up again. “And… wait. When? No, that can’t be right.” Even if he’s mixing up the Stans—he isn’t, he  _knows_  he isn’t, but even if he is—he’s met both of them.

“Says right here, man.” Robbie points at the screen. Dipper leans forward, scanning the text.

“This is… something’s wrong,” Dipper says. “I knew great uncle Ford. I knew great uncle Stan.”

“Not according to this you didn’t,” Robbie says. “Unless you’re older than you look.” He seems to think for a moment. “Or you never saw them in the same room together.”

Dipper has one sharp, clear memory of a dark basement, a bright light, and a punch in the face. “No,” he says. “I remember them fighting. I…” A thought occurs to him: “Great uncle Ford had an extra finger on each hand.”

Robbie snaps his fingers. “Right,” he says. “Right, I remember you telling Eyeball. Huh. I thought you were just trying to make him feel better.”

“What do you mean?” Dipper asks, but he knows the answer before Robbie says it.

“Because the guy I’ve got in my freezer? He’s only got ten.”

“They were twins,” Dipper repeats. “Stanley and Stanford Pines, born in Glass Shard Beach, New Jersey. Stanford had twelve fingers. They were both alive when I was here ten years ago. Beyond that…” Dipper trails off, looks down at the certificate again. “Robbie,” he says. “I think… I think I’ve forgotten something. Something really important.” He’s been having that feeling a lot lately. Ever since he came back to Gravity Falls.

Robbie takes the death certificate. He’s got that expression again, the carefully sympathetic one he puts on and off with his suit. “Leave it with me,” he says. “I’ll look into it. You should call your folks. They’ll know what to do.”

“They’re on a cruise,” Dipper says. Out in the middle of the ocean for the next three months. Dipper doubts they even know Stan’s dead.

“Your sister, then,” Robbie insists. “You need to call  _someone_ , man. Trust me, I’m a professional.”

Dipper nods, feeling the glass weight of his phone in his pocket. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, okay. Thanks, man.”

“Don’t mention it. Least the lead singer of Explosion Muffin can do for the guy who named his band, yeah?”

Despite everything, Dipper manages half a laugh.

* * *

He calls Mabel on the way out of Robbie’s, or tries to. He leaves two voicemails and a text before he’s startled out of his own head by the roar of a motorcycle.

Dipper doesn’t know much about motorcycles, but he sure does know a lot about boys in leather pants riding them. At least, he knows his opinions on them. Particularly when they’re named:

“Bill?”

“I got bored of waiting. Let’s go for a ride.”

Then, before Dipper can reply, a motorcycle helmet is flying through the air, straight at his gut. He catches it, with his body more than his hands. The helmet is black, and a stylized golden Eye of Providence stares up at him from the dome.

“Put it on,” says Bill. “Let’s go.”

“I…” Dipper wants to go with Bill and he wants to talk to his sister. He wants to stay and remember, he wants to leave and forget. Mostly, he remembers Bill saying he once had two accidents in six months.

Dipper puts on the helmet.

* * *

Bill rides like a maniac, although he insists he’s going slow and that Dipper just needs to relax. Dipper does not; half-formed memories of falling upwards bursting like broken universes in his mind every time they take a corner.

On the other hand—both of them, in fact—is Bill’s thin, firm waist. The living heat of him settled between Dipper’s thighs. It’s something to hold on to, and so Dipper does, eyes slammed shut, trying to let let the feel of movement and speed take him. Away from death certificates and missing fingers, away from lost twins and forgotten memories. Away from Gravity Falls, both figuratively and literally, just trusting in whatever mad adventure Bill has in store.

It turns out to be the lookout near the falls themselves. Dipper’s legs are jelly when he gets off the bike, his hair a tangled chaos when he pulls off the helmet. Bill laughs at the sight of him, but Dipper forgives him for it when long black fingers smooth down his hair back into something resembling its usual mop. The gesture is oddly affectionate, coming from Bill, but Dipper doesn’t get time to dwell. Not when Bill grabs him by the hand, lacing their fingers together tight enough to hurt, and starts to drag him up a small trail.

The trail is not well-used, away from the usual lookout. Bill’s produced his cane from somewhere and, despite his limp, he’s practically leaping up the path. Like he’s done this a thousand time before, the worn trail so well-suited to his gait that Dipper starts to think maybe he made it. Dipper, whose legs are shorter and whose tolerance for wilderness is lesser, struggles with the boulders and the inclines. He loses footing, multiple times, and every time he does a strong black arm shoots out to stop him falling.

When the reach where Bill wants to take them, Dipper’s breath is wheezing and his heart pounding, and yet the instant he looks up, all thoughts of complaints are blown away.

“Wow,” he says. Then: “Wow.”

The view is incredible, from the light glimmering off the falls like a river of glitter to the patchwork of the town down beneath it. The forest stretches out like dark carpet, and if Dipper looks, he thinks he can just make out the little clearing at the end of Gopher Road.

There’s a boulder nearby, low and smooth and flat, and Bill is already sitting on it. He looks, Dipper thinks, incredibly pleased with himself; grin huge and bright, long legs stretched out, hands folded pertly on his upright cane. Still, his injured foot twitches, and Dipper thinks he can see a slight sheen of pain behind the bright blue eye.

He sits next to Bill, shoulders and thighs touching, and they watch the town in silence for a while. The sun is warm on Dipper’s skin, the air crisp and cool and smelling of ozone and fresh-cut wood. It’s perfect, and Bill is perfect, in his own manic way. Dragging Dipper up to this place that, Dipper is beginning to suspect, has been seen by one eye alone until now.

Still, in the silence, Dipper’s mind churns.

“So,” Bill says abruptly. “Spill.”

“What?”

“Don’t mistake my flagrant disregard for human social cues for the inability to understand them,” Bill says. He’s still grinning out at the view, even if he’s talking to Dipper. Dipper, who’s once again sitting on Bill’s blind side, which seems to be becoming a habit. Bill continues: “I am an astute and long-term observer of your species and thus I know, Dipper Pines, that something is bothering you. So spill. Don’t make me go into your head and drag it out. Telling me here will make things easier for both of us later, trust me.” His voice is so… triangular today, that Dipper has a half-remembered flashback to his dream. Of sitting in the forest watching a tree burn slowly to the ground. Knowing that if he turned just slightly he’d see—

“It doesn’t have anything to do with you,” Dipper says, not unkindly.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” says Bill. “You might be surprised.” A pause. “You will be surprised, sooner or later.”

“It’s about my great uncle,” Dipper says. Then reconsiders: “It’s about this  _town_.”

“Mmm…?” Bill prompts.

So Dipper tells him. Everything; from what he remembers from the first time he was here, right up to the encounter with Robbie he just walked out of. Every missing piece, every half-remembered thing, no matter how unlikely it seems now he’s put it into words. Bill just listens, silent bar prompting Dipper when the latter’s voice falters.

“I just don’t know what to think any more,” Dipper ends with. “My sister… when we were younger, she always used to tell these crazy stories about the summer we spent here. And I’m talking really crazy, man. Like, she used to insist the eighth-and-a-half President of the United States preserved himself in peanut brittle for like two centuries, then made her a congresswoman when she let him free.”

“Quentin Trembley,” Bill says.

“How— how do you—?”

“Local legend,” Bill says. “From the town.”

“Oh.” That makes sense. “Right. Well… I used to believe her,” Dipper continues. “Or… play along, I guess? We’d talk about how we fought zombies with karaoke or the time we had to return her merman boyfriend to the sea. She’d even write letters to herself as ‘Mermando’, put them in bottles and read them out. My sister, I mean… She’s great, but…” Dipper sighs. “I guess I grew out of it at about the time I got to high school. I just… we weren’t kids any more. It was time to start growing up.” Then, Dipper says the thing he’s never said to anyone else, not even Mabel: “I don’t think she ever forgave me for moving on. We still fight about it sometimes.” It’s about the only thing they do fight about, in fact.

Bill is silent for a long time. When Dipper sneaks a peak, he sees Bill’s knuckles have gone gray against the crook of his cane, his brow pulled down into a scowl over his eyepatch.

“What if,” Bill says, very slowly, as if each word is an unfamiliar cipher he’s decrypting by hand. “What if it’s true. All of it?”

“Even the part about the eighth-and-a-half president?”

“Especially that.”

“Then my sister is a congresswoman and that’s kind of terrifying?”

“I’m not sure that’s how your government works, Pine Tree.”

There’s that itching feeling again, like something shaking just behind his eyeballs. “Bill,” he says, “why do you call me ‘Pine Tree’?” This feels important. Important in some way Dipper can’t remember.

“It was on your hat. And true names have power. People forget that.”

“I lost that hat years ago,” Dipper says. Over the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge, in fact.

“I know,” Bill says. “But you always used to wear it back then. You and your hat, Robbie and his hoodie, Gideon and his star… A symbol for everyone and everyone for a symbol. It’s all one big cipher, you of all people should realize.”

“I… I didn’t know you’d been in town that long.”

Bill shrugs. “There’s a lot of things about me you don’t know. Not yet.”

That feels, if not like an invitation, then definitely a save-the-date card. Dipper tacks it to his mental fridge, leaning a little closer against Bill’s side.

After a while, he says: “If it’s true… everything my sister used to say, I mean. If it’s true, it means… it means nothing in the world works like I think.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

Dipper thinks about this, long and careful. “I… I don’t know,” he says eventually. It’s not, he knows, the answer he would’ve given half a lifetime ago. 

“Do you want to find out?”

It’s an odd question for an odd conversation, but Bill is warm and the view is beautiful, and it’s just the two of them, sitting above the world. So Dipper says, “Do I have a choice?”

“Yes,” Bill says. “This time, you can have a choice.”  _This time_ , as if there were a last time.

Dipper considers it. What would he do, if the choice were his to make? He remembers Bill’s words from the other day, his insistence there’s no knowledge without power, no power without exploitation. Dipper wants to think better of people, wants to think better of himself, but truth be told he isn’t sure.

If there was a secret, hidden at the core of the world, if Dipper could know it, if knowing it would disrupt everything he believed to be true, if it would put him apart from the rest of humanity forever… If all of that, what would he do? Eat from the Tree and be banished, or live on in the garden, blissful in ignorance?

He says:

“If it’s true, if the world really is crazy, then Mabel already knows. And I can’t leave her alone in that. She’s my  _sister_.”

At the response, Bill’s fingers unclench from his cane. He spreads them wide, wriggles them, and Dipper gets the impression he’s managed to surprise the guy. He feels oddly smug about that.

“Pine Tree…” Bill says. And then his hand darts out, strong fingers grasping at Dipper’s jaw, hard enough to hurt. Dipper has just enough time to be shocked before his head is turned and, this time, it’s Bill kissing him, nothing hesitant or chase or uncertain about it. Bill  _bites_ , sharp teeth snagging on Dipper’s lip, breath hot and ragged against the skin of Dipper’s cheek. For a man who doesn’t eat, he is hungry; his cane falling to the ground with a clatter as he balls both fists in Dipper’s jacket, hauling him closer then pushing him back, down onto the rock, Dipper propped up on his elbows as Bill looms above him.

“Bill,” Dipper gasps between kisses. “Bill!”

“What?” It’s practically a growl, Bill’s eye is shut tight, his whole body so tense he’s shaking.

“Dude, are you okay?” It’s not that Dipper isn’t 100% down with getting freaky with a hot guy in leathers in this most scenic of locations. He’d just prefer it if said hot guy was also into it. “We don’t have to do this if—”“Shut  _up_.” And Bill is surging forward again, all heat and teeth.

Dipper stops him. One hand against Bill’s collarbone, dangerously close to the guy’s throat.

“Hey,” he says. He tries to catch Bill’s eye, which is difficult, as Bill seems very intently focused on the rock about an inch to the right of Dipper’s head. “Seriously, man,” he says. He relaxes the hand holding Bill back. Not taking it away, just softening the touch, turning it into a caress.

“This is what you want,” Bill says. He’s still not looking at Dipper, still snarling maybe more at himself than anything outside.

“Yeah,” says Dipper, because he does. “But only if it’s what you want, too.”

“It’s not that simple.”

Dipper sighs, gets the feeling he isn’t going to get laid on this particular rock at this particular moment, and sits up. Bill doesn’t stop him, just sort of goes with it, retreating so far into his own head he may as well be in a different dimension. Dipper just sits with him, their fingers laced together, their foreheads touching. Finally, Bill says:

“You shouldn’t be with me.”

“But I want to be.” It’s not a lie. Very, very much not.

“That’s not—”Bill starts to snarl, then cuts himself off, jaw working, sharp teeth grinding against his bottom lip.

“Do  _you_  want to be with  _me_?” This isn’t a question Dipper wants to ask, in case the answer’s something he doesn’t want to hear. He knows that’s the reason he has to say it.

Bill just snaps: “That’s not important either!”

Dipper thinks, quite clearly, that there is someone in Bill’s past who is lining up for a date with Dipper’s fist. Maybe lots of someones. Bill, who’s self-destructive and standoffish, and talks about being human as if he isn’t, or shouldn’t be. Dipper doesn’t think that’s the sort of thing that just happens, all on its own.

“Bill,” he says, “I don’t know a lot of things, but I do know that, when it comes down to it, there’s really only one thing that  _is_  important. And that’s how we care for other people. For our families, our friends. Even total strangers. The universe could end tomorrow and that would be the only secret, the only thing ever mattered. Everything else is illusions and holograms.”

Dipper can feel Bill’s fingers, clenching and unclenching within Dipper’s own, can see Bill’s lips, parting and un-parting. Finally, Bill says:

“Fuck.”

This time, when he moves in for a kiss, Dipper doesn’t stop him.

* * *

They stumble back down the hill not long after, still locked hand-in-hand. Bill isn’t as agile on the downslope as he is going up, and Dipper is truly awful, but they help each other and take it slow, and they make it in the end.

They ride back into town and, this time, Dipper even manages to enjoy it. Eyes still closed, arms still wrapped around Bill’s waist, but there’s something different in him, now. Like a tight-wound spring popped back up on the hill, and Dipper feels better than he has in days or weeks or years.

Something’s coming. He knows that, can smell the ozone in the air and feel the static on his skin. But the storm hasn’t broken yet—the meteor hasn’t landed—and until it does, it’s just him and Bill and a motorcycle, driving too fast through the woods.

* * *

They end up at the mall. Bill may not eat but Dipper’s ravenous, and so he grabs a forgettable burger from a forgettable chain. He loses sight of Bill for a while as he does so, but the man reappears holding two tickets to the reboot of  _Duck-tective_.

The film is awful, but there are explosions, and Dipper discovers Bill, if not likes, then at least tolerates the taste of popcorn. Unsalted and unbuttered, but Dipper figures it’ll do, and he spends most of the film feeding it to Bill between long and languid kisses.

By the time the credits roll, they’re rubbing noses in the dark, eyes half-lidded, cheeks flushed. Dipper is painfully, agonizingly hard so when he says:

“Come home with me?”

And Bill says:

“Yeah.”

It’s the greatest news he’s had all week.

* * *

It takes Dipper five tries to unlock the door, which is entirely Bill’s fault. Bill and his soft mouth and sharp teeth and clever inky fingers, lifting up Dipper’s shirt and ghosting over his belly. If he’s not careful, they’re going to end up fucking on the back porch of the Mystery Shack, and it’s not that Dipper’s against the idea, but nights are still cold in the middle of the forest and Dipper has a sudden, sharp, burning urge to know  _exactly_  how far up Bill’s thighs his tattoos go.

Dipper trips on the third stair to the attic, nearly lands on his ass but for the arm that wraps around his shoulders. He’s practically being held in a dip—a dip for Dipper, his mind thinks, blood-starved and giddy—and when he swoons the gesture is only half a joke.

Dipper’s jacket ends up at the bottom of the stairs, Bill’s on the landing. Then they’re in the attic, Dipper’s shirt hitting the creepy red window with a dull  _thwap_ , followed closely by Bill’s tie.

Then Dipper is untucking bright yellow cotton, turned orange in the light. Then too many buttons, and then—

The black does go right up. All the way over Bill’s shoulders, in fact, before dissolving into the oblong outline of brickwork across his collar and chest.

Dipper licks his lips. “Wow,” he says. He traces the outlines with his fingers, somehow surprised when the skin beneath is just skin, when he can’t feel grooves or grout. Then he’s laughing, and Bill is raising an eyebrow, and Dipper says, “For some reason, I thought they’d be triangles.” Lest it be mistaken for a criticism, he punctuates the statement with a kiss, long and slow, his hands running across black lines and too-defined bones, over and over. “I like this better,” he says when he pulls back.

Bill is grinning, one half of his mouth pulled back like he’s trying not to and can’t help it, teeth pressing against his lip. Dipper licks them, because he can, and then they’re both stumbling backwards, into the bedroom, skin to skin.

“Fair’s fair,” Bill says, his hands running through the forest of fuzz across Dipper’s chest, down his stomach, to brush across the button of his jeans. He has The Look in his eye, The Look Dipper’s gotten from every single lover he’s ever had.

Dipper groans. “No,” he says. “Don’t say it. Don’t make the—”Bill, being Bill, is not listening.

“Time to find out,” he says, “just how  _big_  this Dipper is.”

Dipper buries his head in the soft crook of Bill’s neck. “I hate you,” he tells the skin there, but he’s laughing. “You’re awful and I hate you.”

“Not yet you don’t,” Bill says. A pop and a flick later, and his hand is curled exactly where Dipper wants it.

Dipper bites, just a slight brush of teeth. But this time it’s Bill’s turn to groan, squeezing his hand in encouragement, sending lashes of heat through Dipper’s cock. “Harder.” Bill tilts his head back. Then, when Dipper tries: “I said harder and I meant  _harder_.”

So Dipper bites. There’s gonna be a mark, and he feels bad for exactly the half a heartbeat it takes for Bill to start laughing. Laughing and bucking his own hips, rutting through thick leather against Dipper’s thigh.

Shoes are the worst. There is no sexy way, Dipper thinks, to take off shoes. He’s hard as a rock, his dick sticking out of his half open pants, hopping around on one foot trying to kick off his sneakers. Bill, meanwhile, is wearing boots fit for a motorbike and they have buckles and zips, which is awful. Dipper falls onto the bed behind him while he’s busy, hands winding their way around Bill’s hips, undoing belt and button and fly.

Bill is uncut, which Dipper finds momentarily surprising. Then there’s two thuds of rubber on wood, and they’re rolling over and over each other on the narrow bed, shimmying Bill’s pants over his narrow hips and lean thighs. Then, whoosh! Over the end of the bed the leather goes, and Dipper discovers that, yes, as promised Bill’s legs are as black as his arms, more of the brickwork pattern stretching over his hips and cupping the underneath of his ass.

Then they’re lying, skin-to-skin, breath heaving and hearts hammering, and there’s only one thing left to do.

Dipper touches the eyepatch carefully, not sure if it’s A Thing or not. There’s one moment of stillness in the frenzy, Bill watching for some kind of… something. Whatever it is, he must find it, giving a tiny nod.

The skin under the patch is exactly like Dipper remembers, smooth and unmarked. A strange little hollow above Bill’s cheek and beneath his brow. Dipper runs his fingers across the space then, when Bill does nothing to stop him, kisses soft flesh. Beneath him, Bill shudders, fingers twisted tight enough in Dipper’s hair to hurt. Then he’s reaching up, mouth open and begging for a kiss Dipper is only too happy to provide.

Bill groans again, arching off the bed, and Dipper bites his lower lip hard enough to draw blood. Bill laughs, the sound as wild and unhinged as a forest fire, his hand snaking down between their bodies until it’s wrapped around their aching cocks. Then they’re both rutting, heat and pressure and the faint smell of blood, and Dipper can feel something building, a point of light that builds like a newborn universe in his core.

When it opens, he throws back his head, breath running in choking gasps as he comes in thick, staggering bursts across Bill’s smooth, soft skin.

When their own world comes back, everything is soft and fuzzy, backlit by Bill’s maniac’s laugh. His stomach is a mess and so is his hand, but he came, and Dipper came, and all is right with the world as Dipper curls into his side, self-satisfied and smug, nuzzling into the flesh beneath Bill’s ear.

Bill’s arms hold Dipper just as tight as he holds Bill, even if the latter can’t seem to stop laughing. Eventually, the sound sets Dipper off too, and he giggles into Bill’s neck for a while before he asks, “What’s so funny?”

“This,” Bill says. “Sex. Sex is always funny.”

Dipper’s lips curl into a smile. “I think I should be offended,” he says.

“Don’t be stupid,” Bill says. “You didn’t invent it.”

Dipper gasps in mock outrage. “Excuse  _you_ ,” he says. “Are you in fact implying that I, Dipper Pines, am  _not_  the One True God of Sex?”

Bill pretends to contemplate this. “We-ee-ee-ell,” he says. “You know. It’s a little hard to tell. I’ll need to conduct more investigations.”

Dipper is twenty-two years old and has just come, but his dick still twitches. “Better be thorough,” he says.

“ _Very_  thorough.”

“Wouldn’t want to miss any evidence.”

“That would be a tragedy.”

And then they’re laughing again, and naked, and sticky, and all is right with the world and everything in it.

* * *

True to his word, Bill’s investigations are very, very thorough. Both that fourth day, and the fifth.

And on the sixth, Mabel Pines returns to the Mystery Shack, a shooting star fallen from the heavens, and everything burns.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [I REGRET NOTHING](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ1c9ErCn7w)!!!
> 
> Oh yeah, incidentally: I'd never actually listened to David Lynch talk before reading he's the basis for Bill's voice, so I Googled it and... [holy shit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35JZG3CdiWE&feature=youtu.be&t=40).


	5. Day 7

When he wakes up, he’s alone. No tangle of limbs in the sheets, no skin warming his, no second heartbeat beneath his ear. Just him.

He can hear voices, coming from downstairs.

It’s still dark, the moon bright and waning through the yellow pyramid of the attic’s window. A sleepy eye on its way to closing but, tonight, the eye doesn’t move and the window doesn’t speak, and from that Dipper knows he’s awake.

If he’s awake, and alone, there shouldn’t be talking downstairs.

The air is cool when he swings himself from the bed, pulling on boxers and a t-shirt as he crosses the floor. If he’s going to surprise intruders in his house, he doesn’t want to be doing it naked. To be fair, he doesn’t want to be doing it at all. He wishes he’d left something useful up here, like a baseball bat or sword. But all he’s got is a laptop and a pile of Bill’s crumpled clothes.

The voice is also Bill’s; Dipper can make out the nasal twang of it by the time he’s halfway down the stairs. It’s his triangle voice, the one he uses when he’s annoyed or annoying or both.

“—in the house,” he’s saying. He’s having half a conversation, snippets of sentences that don’t quite make sense. “Yes, ‘still’. It’s working, isn’t it? I don’t— This is easier. If he’s distracted, he’s not thinking about— Yes, I know I can, but—”“Bill?”

Dipper steps into the den. The room is bright, cast in a cold blue glow it takes Dipper a moment to realize is coming from Bill himself. He’s sitting, naked and cross-legged, floating in mid-air just above the Eye of Providence on the carpet.

“Shit. He’s here.”

Bill turns. Dipper’s first thought is that he has two eyes, even though he doesn’t. He has one eye, and a glowing symbol that looks like an eye, floating just beneath his empty brow. Eight little lashes and a long slit pupil, and Dipper’s seen that eye before. Oh yes, yes he has.

For a moment, neither of them say anything. Dipper feels something building up, a pressure behind his skull, an earthquake waiting to happen.

“Bill,” he says. “What’s going on?” He’s starting to think he knows the answer. He’s starting to think he’s always known the answer, and just hasn’t wanted to admit it. Has wanted to think better, both of Bill, and of himself.

Bill’s jaw works, teeth grinding together behind lips thinned out to pale gashes. His meat-eye blinks, his light-eye doesn’t.

“Bill…” Dipper’s voice sounds dangerous, even to himself. He has a memory, of being twelve, of looking at a Dipper-who-wasn’t, all torn-pupil eyes and lunatic grin.

And then, as sudden as a flicked switch, Bill’s expression is the same one Dipper remembers. Vacant and horrific and inhuman, his voice a whine of angles as he says, “Sorry, Pine Tree. You shoulda stayed in bed. This conversation isn’t for you.”

“Bill!” Dipper’s rage is red and white and reaches into the heavens. He takes one step, fist balling, raising, ready to smack the smug monster grin off Bill’s stolen face.

Bill says: “Go back to sleep. You’ll forget this in the morning.” And then he snaps his fingers, a flare of blue fire igniting as he does. It’s the last thing Dipper sees before his eyes close and unconsciousness slams over him like a bunker door.

* * *

When he wakes up, a huge blue eye is watching him, just inches from his own.

“You are such a creeper.”

The muscle beneath the eye twitches upwards, pushed by a sharp-toothed smile. “I like watching you sleep,” says Bill. “I don’t normally get to see it from this side. It’s  _interesting_.”

“Cr-eeper.” But he’s reaching up, arms circling Bill’s waist, rolling him over in the narrow bed. Bill goes easily, eye closing and smile beatific, skin glowing in the golden light of morning. It’s stupid early still, but Dipper’s up, and he’s  _up_ , and Bill is a big compliant tangle of long black limbs and clever fingers. They’ll just have to find some way to pass the time.

It occurs to Dipper, in that last and perfect moment, that he might just be in love.

* * *

The pounding on the door is a surprise. Bill’s still in the shower, so Dipper stumbles out of the bathroom, pulling on as many clothes as are probably his. Enough to make him feel something like presentable. He’s not expecting anyone, and especially not his sister.

“Ta-da!”

“Mabel!”

She still smells like Mabel, even under the designer perfume and day’s worth of traveler’s sweat. Dipper hugs her, solid and real in his arms, and it’s like hugging the other half of his soul.

“I thought you weren’t in until later tonight?”

“I caught an earlier bus,” Mabel says, her voice muffled against Dipper’s shoulder. “I had to get here, bro-bro. To see you!”

“Mabel, I—”Dipper has a million things to tell her, and now that she’s here, he has no idea where he should start.

Mabel, of course, has her own ideas. She pulls out of the hug, keeping her hands on Dipper’s shoulders, their foreheads close together, her stare bright and piercing. “First! Date. Details. Spill.”

The last thing Dipper said to her, back when they’d argued the other day. It seems a long time ago, and Dipper knows he’s grinning like an idiot and just can’t help it.

“C’mon c’mon c’mon,” Mabel says. “Don’t hold out on me. Boy or girl? Do I know them? It’s not Wendy again is it? No, it’s not Wendy, she’s in the Himalayas. So who is it? Are they cute? How did you meet? Where—”Dipper is laughing, big and light and easy, taking his sister’s hands off his shoulders, trying to edge in between her word explosion. “Ssh!” he says. “Ssh! He’s still here. He’s having a shower.”

“He stayed the night!” Mabel, who has exactly two settings, LOUD and LOUDER. “Dipper!” It descends into an ecstatic shriek Dipper tries to smother with his sister’s own hands, even as he pulls her into the house.

“Mabel, stop,” he laughs. “No, you’ll scare him off.”

“It’s going to take more than that to scare me off, Pine Tree.”

And then, quite suddenly, Mabel goes very, very still and very, very silent, her eyes huge and round in her head.

“Hey look, it’s Shooting Star. Long time no see.”

For a moment, Dipper thinks, hopes, Mabel’s reaction is because Bill is, well, Bill. Standing in the hallway, damp-haired, wearing a towel and not much else. He’s amazing, and Dipper’s heart does the thing, the little flip-flop thing, to see him.

And then Mabel says:

“ _Bill Cipher_?”

Dipper’s first thought is that it’s the first time he’s heard someone say Bill’s whole name. He’d assumed the kid at the coffeeshop calling Bill “Mr. Cipher” was a joke, and maybe it still is, but maybe not the one Dipper thinks.

Dipper’s second thought is that his sister sounds  _furious_.

“You slept with  _Bill Cipher_? He’s your ‘date’?”

Maybe not furious. Maybe terrified.

“Mabel, I—”“Dipper how  _could_  you? I— No. Wait. I know  _exactly_  how could you, and  _you_ ”—here she rounds on Bill, finger extended in accusation—“How are you even  _here_? Whose body is that? Who did you steal?” Then, to the room in general: “Mind ghost? Whoever you are, I can help you. Pick something up. Something small. You can—”“Mabel, what are you—?” Dipper starts, but Mabel’s not listening and neither, as it turns out, is Bill.

“There’s nothing there, kid,” he tells Mabel. “Never was. It’s a clone, made just for me.” He slaps his chest.

“Don’t encourage her!” Dipper snaps. No one listens. He has the sudden feeling he hasn’t just lost control of this conversation, he’s lost control of his  _life_.

Mabel says: “What are you up to now, Bill Cipher? Whatever it is, I won’t let you get away with it. I won’t let you have my brother!”

“Too late for that,” Dipper mutters. Then, louder: “Mabel, stop it.”

This, she does listen to, turning back to face him even as she’s still looking at Bill. Like Bill’s going to lunge and attack her at any moment. “No, Dipper, you need to listen to me. I know you don’t remember, but you have to trust me. Bill is  _bad news_ , Dipper. The worst.”

“Mabel!” Dipper looks at Bill, thinks of every apology he can for his sister’s behavior. But Bill doesn’t look upset or offended or angry. He looks, if anything, amused. Amused and, perhaps, resigned.

Their eyes meet, and Bill smiles.  _It’s okay,_  he mouthes, and Dipper feels himself relax.

Mabel notices. “Don’t you dare, Bill Cipher! Not in my house. In fact, this  _is_  my house, and I don’t want you in it! Not now, not yesterday, not tomorrow. So get out!”

“Mabel!”

“Out! Out, you evil, brother-stealing, mono-visioned Dorito! The power of Mabel compels you!” She makes a cross with her arms, as if conducting an exorcism.

“Mabel,” Dipper says. “Mabel, we’re Jewish. And also: stop trying to exorcise my boyfriend!”

“He’s not your boyfriend, Dipper. He’s a demon! A mean, annoying, triangular demon.”

Bill rolls his eye. “Can I at least get dressed first?”

“No! Get  _out_!”

“Bill,” Dipper says, “you don’t have to—”“It’s okay. Your sister’s going to pop something if I don’t.” He takes two steps forward before Mabel hisses at him like a cat.

“Stay back! Stay back, demon!”

“Mabel,” Dipper says. “Mabel, you’re blocking the door. He can’t leave if you’re blocking the door.” He wonders when the whole world went insane. Things were fine yesterday, right? Fine and naked.

He manages to maneuver Mabel away from the door by ushering her into the kitchen. She tries to drag Dipper with her, imploring him to stay away from Bill, but he’s had more than enough. He’s furious with her. Furious, and more than a little worried.

“I don’t know why she’s acting so unhinged,” he tells Bill on the porch. Bill gets dresses then and there, unconcerned with being naked in the forest. Not that he has anything to be concerned about.

“Don’t worry about it,” Bill says. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine,” Dipper says. “She shouldn’t say those things to you.” No one should, Dipper thinks. Least of all his sister.

But Bill just shrugs. “She’s not wrong,” he says, pulling on his shirt.

Dipper helps him with the buttons. “Uh-huh,” he says. “About you being an evil demon Dorito in a stolen clone body?” He says it as a joke, he really does, but there’s that itching feeling again.

“Well,” says Bill, “we can wax philosophic on the definition of evil, it wasn’t stolen, and I find the ‘Dorito’ comment deeply offensive but, otherwise, yes.”

“Right. And you haven’t mentioned this before now because…?” Buttons done, now for the tie. Bill allows it, and Dipper gets the impression he’s enjoying the attention. 

“Well, because I’ve been very interested in screwing you and I thought if you knew I was secretly a sentient extra-dimensional polygon trapped in a false body then you’d be weird about it. I’m aware this is fundamentally selfish and somewhat unethical but, hey. There’s that whole ‘demon’ thing you for you. Oh, and incidentally?”

Dipper gets halfway through a “hmm?” before Bill is surging forward. And maybe Dipper can believe Bill’s a demon, if only because he kisses like it. Lips and tongue and teeth and hands, the sound of Mabel’s howled  _Dipper, no!_  echoing through the door. Dipper, who doesn’t care if Bill is some evil geometry lesson, so long as he keeps doing that thing with he tongue. The thing that makes his heart flutter and his belly tighten and—

And then hands are running through Dipper’s hair, kisses along his jaw, teeth teasing the soft flesh beneath his ear. And then Bill’s voice, barely more than a breath:

“And incidentally, because we’re always being watched.”

Before Dipper can react, Bill is pulling back. He grabs his jacket from Dipper’s stunned grasp. Throws it on, then he’s off at a long-legged limp.

“See ya, Mabel,” he calls, waving over his shoulder.

“Go back to hell, Bill!”

Bill is still laughing when he pulls on his helmet, turning back to Dipper for one last blown kiss goodbye. Mabel makes a disgusted noise at the sight, and the little ball of anger curling in Dipper’s gut finally pops. He waits until Bill’s gone, vanished on his bike back down the road. Mabel’s bags are still on the porch, and Dipper picks them up, very carefully. Then he walks into the house, very carefully, and puts the bags down just inside the door. All very careful. Just like the way Mabel is watching him from where she sits on the old sofa. Just like the way he goes to sit next to her. Just like the silence the hangs between them and just like the way Dipper breaks it with:

“Are you going to tell me what that was all about?” He’s very, very proud of how level his voice sounds.

“I did.”

Dipper takes a deep breath, then another. The says:

“How about, this time, you use Dipper-words, rather than Mabel-words.” They’ve had this argument before. This is how they navigate it.

“Dipper…”

“Just—!” No, too hard, too sharp. Dipper softens it. This is his sister. He loves her, always. Whatever he’s feeling today, it’ll pass. “Just… humor me, Mabel.”

A pause, a sigh, then:

“Bill was here the last time we were. I’m not surprised you don’t remember him. He looked… different.”

“What did he do,” Dipper says, “that you still hate him ten years later?”

“It… it’s hard to explain,” Mabel says.

“Try.”

“He used to… to bully you. I think… You had something he wanted. And there was… a feud. With our family. He took that out on you. Badly. I… I don’t know if you remember, when I had the puppet show?”

“A little.”

“You remember how you felt afterwards?”

“… Yeah.” It was a long time ago, but Dipper does remember. Exhausted and aching, covered in bruises and cuts he couldn’t remember getting.

“That… that was Bill,” Mabel says. “I’m sorry, Dipper.” And she is, he knows. He can hear her heartbreak.

“That’s why you hate him?”

“He’s not good… not a good person.”

“I know,” Dipper says, because he’s not an idiot. Then: “Why don’t I remember any of this?”

“I don’t know how you want me to answer that.”

When he was younger, Dipper used to sometimes think he switched Mabels on the way home from Gravity Falls. That somewhere out there, his sister was sitting dumbfounded and angry, next to a Dipper who talked about demons and magic and monsters. He hasn’t thought that in a very, very long time. He’s pretty sure he’d know if Mabel wasn’t his Mabel, just like she’d know if he wasn’t her Dipper.

He turns his hand palm-up on his knee. Mabel takes it, without hesitation.

“How did you meet him?” she asks.

“He works for Gideon”—Dipper feels his sister jerk, but she says nothing—“and he’s Robbie’s friend. I met him that night with Tambry. The next morning, he bought me coffee. Then the morning after. Kept leaving cryptograms for me to solve on the cups. I’ve spent most of the last week with him.”

“Do… do you…?”

“Yes,” Dipper says, because he knows what the end of that sentence is going to be, and he knows the answer. “He’s not an easy person to like. Intense. Most people seem to be afraid of him. I assume there’s a reason for that, beyond the eye and the teeth. Pacifica and Gideon hinted at a bad past.” Lots of little pieces, forming up in neat, straight lines.

Mabel takes this all in, harm warm and smooth in Dipper’s own. Finally, she says: “I don’t like it. But if he makes you happy—”“He does.”

“—then I’ll try. But if he breaks your heart, I will  _end_  him.” The she covers their linked fingers with her other hand, and when Dipper looks at her, her eyes are bright and shining.

“I’ve really missed you, sis,” he says.

“Me too, bro-bro.”

And then it’s all hugs and not-quite-awkward back-patting, and Dipper never wants to let go.

* * *

An hour later:

“Oh, yeah! I forgot. I hope you weren’t planning on working for a living, because we are  _totally_  rich now.”

* * *

They spend most of the rest of the day going through the house. Mabel cries in the way Dipper can’t, and he figures that’s okay. Particularly when they find photos and mementos of the last time they were here. A glittery fishing lure, a box of chewed-up pens, sock puppet versions of themselves.

They spend a good fifteen minutes with the latter. Dipper as Mabel and Mabel as Dipper, crouched on the floor of the attic, using the red-cushioned window seat as a makeshift stage. Mabel tells her stories—running away from a moving mass of tiny gnomes, being chased by a mechanical lake monster—and they both laugh until they cry.

It occurs to Dipper, lying on the old attic floor, bathed in the red glow of the stained glass Eye above them, how much he’s missed his twin. Even if he isn’t glad of the circumstances that brought them back together, he’s glad they are. If only for a little while.

Sometime in the early afternoon, a car pulls up outside. It’s a shiny purple Jaguar, and when Pacifica steps out, Mabel’s squeal nearly shatters windows.

The women spend the afternoon catching up downstairs. Mabel’s upset about Gideon, but not as vocally as to her brother. Expecting the reaction, Pacifica is holding an apology bouquet, flowers made from small rolls of exclusive designer fabrics.

“For your classes,” she says, handing it over. “If there are some you really like, I can get more.”

“Are you kidding me?” Mabel, at full Mabel. “I love all of them! They’ll make the  _cutest_  skirt. Thank you so much!”

Dipper leaves them to their reunion, Mabel hanging off Pacifica’s neck like she never intends to let go, Pacifica stuck between trying to preserve her dignity and appreciation over the affection.

Ten years, Dipper thinks, and sometimes it’s like they never left.

* * *

“You really aren’t going to wear  _that_ , are you?”

Another day, another invitation for dinner at the Northwest-Gleeful’s. Except, this time, Dipper has a sister to deal with.

To her credit, Mabel does look amazing in her own brand of haute couture vintage 80s upcycling. Dipper figures it’s only a matter of time before he’s walking up a hill in San Francisco, looking at a girl dressed in clothes from his sister’s fashion house.

Unfortunately, his sister’s élan stopped entirely with her. He looks down at his own clothes; the same jeans-tshirt-jacket ensemble he’s been wearing since he got here. “What?”

Mabel just rolls her eyes. “Dip- _per_ ,” she says. “How do men even date you? I get women have low expectations—”

“Hey!”

“—but seriously. I mean, look at Bill. If nothing else, at least he’s always known how to accessorize.”

“It’s not my fault hot guys are dazzled by my boundless intellect and rapier wit,” Dipper says, which earns him a cross-eyed raspberry from his sister.

“You’re hopeless,” Mabel says. “Let’s go.” Then she’s pushing him out of the house. Dipper wonders what it says about him that everyone he loves has a habit of manhandling him in and out of buildings.

* * *

Truth be told, Dipper’s nervous about Mabel’s reaction to Gideon. The last thing he wants is to be marched out of Northwest Manor in disgrace if Mabel tries something weird. But his worries come to nothing and Mabel is, if a little colder than usual, otherwise perfectly civil.

Dinner is delicious, as expected, and conversation flows fast and easy; mostly Pacifica grilling Mabel over her time abroad. While they’re preoccupied, Gideon turns to Dipper and asks, “Have you had a chance to consider my offer?”

The offer on his great uncle’s house, right. Dipper keeps forgetting, in between everything else. So he confesses he has not, and Gideon just shrugs. “No hurry. It’s always open.” Then, an immediate segue into: “And things with Bill?”

“Uh…” Dipper’s still not sure how to answer, but Gideon’s expression is polite and curious, no hint of disapproval or censure. So Dipper allows himself a small grin, and says: “Great. Really… really great. He’s great.” He’s pretty sure he’s blushing, and tries to hide it behind a too-big gulp of wine.

Gideon just laughs, slapping Dipper on the back. “Good man, good man,” he says. “I’m pleased for the both of you. He sends his apologies for tonight, by the way. We did invite him, but he has another commitment.”

“Who?” Pacifica, turning to join in the conversation. She answers her own question with a, “Oh, Bill.” She turns back to Mabel. “He talks about your brother all the time, you know. It’s so adorable.”

“Adora- _Bill_ ,” Mabel corrects, like she can’t help herself. Then the girls are laughing, and Dipper is blushing, and a part of him can almost believe everything will be okay.

* * *

After dinner, there’s more drinks, then poker. Mabel is the driver, and thus sober. So she cleans the rest of them out while Dipper gets the 101 on whiskey appreciation from, of all people, Pacifica. They lose sight of Mabel and Gideon for a while, and Dipper is worried until Pacifica puts a hand on his arm and says, “It’s okay. He’s just wants to apologize to her. For how things went down when were were younger.”

“Oh,” says Dipper. “I… guess I don’t really remember much about it.”

Pacifica just shrugs. “It’s a long time ago. Who remembers everything they did when they were twelve, right?”

“My sister, apparently.”

Pacifica’s lips twist into a smirk. “Let me rephrase: who  _wants_  to remember everything they did when they were twelve?” Dipper laughs, but she continues, voice more serious, “God knows I wasn’t the best person I could’ve been at that age. And I did some awful things to Mabel. Every day I’m thankful she forgave me, and I hope maybe she’ll be able to forgive Gideon, too.”

Dipper nods. They’re standing in some kind of library, huge windows looking out over the forest and the town. It reminds Dipper a little of Bill’s lookout, and he feels a dull pang of loss, his hand aching for the pressure of ink-black fingers. “It’s funny,” he says. “Everyone I’ve hung out with since I’ve come back, we used to  _hate_  each other. Nowadays, whatever went down in the past, it seems so unimportant.”

“People change,” Pacifica says. “I’ve been assured it’s part of this ‘growing up’”—she makes the air-quotes, over-enunciating the words as if they’re unfamiliar—“I’ve heard rumors about.”

Dipper mock-shudders. “What a terrifying curse that must be.”

“I hear it falls on everyone, sooner or later.”

“How about,” Dipper suggests, “let’s not, and say we did?”

An elegant laugh, like the chiming of a little silver bell. “Amen to that.” Pacifica raises her glass.

Dipper mimics the gesture. Then they drink, and the whiskey tastes like burnished gold and burning forests.

* * *

That night, it rains qubits.

He’s is alone in the house, drifting past boarded shut doors and lifeless silver windows. It’s not until he reaches the attic he notices the light over the forest. The flickering blue of a million quantum possibilities, ghosting down like cold embers.

He races outside as fast as he can. Leaping and stumbling down the stairs, desperate in case the phenomenon should stop before he can see it.

It doesn’t, and when he darts outside, he’s laughing, arms outstretched, feeling uncertainty collide against his skin. Little fireflies of cold blue, tickling across his arms and cheeks and lips. Up above, the huge golden moon wanes into the shape of an eye, lifted by a smile.

There’s a message in the qubits. He knows this, even as he whirls across the grass. The same pattern, falling over and over and over. He knows, in the way anyone knows anything in a dream, that the cipher is a message, left just for him. He knows it’s crucial he not forget it, and so he turns the pattern into a song, chanting kets into the night.

He’ll still remember lyrics when he wakes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... and the B-plot should be arriving right about [now](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBAIVEJ0lfM).


	6. Day 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one we've got a **content warning** for mention of body horror/dysphoria induced self-harm. Also more dubious cryptography.

He spends all morning typing madly at his laptop. Mabel finds him at it, hunched at the attic window seat, just after dawn.

“Whoa. That sounds serious.”

“Had a dream,” Dipper says, the words curt and unadorned, his mind still singing kets.

“A dream?” She sounds dubious, walking over to peer at the laptop screen. He tilts the device to allow it. “Oh. Quantum stuff.” She’s seen Dipper’s textbooks enough to know what she’s looking at, even if she doesn’t understand it. Dipper doesn’t understand drape or bias or fit, so he figures it’s even.

“Hey,” he says. “You wanna go grab breakfast in town?”

There’s a silence during which he can feel Mabel’s face getting closer to his own. When he turns to look, she’s grinning a leering grin, inches from his eye. “This ‘breakfast’ wouldn’t involve…  _coffee_ , would it?”

Dipper smiles, turning back to his work. “It might.”

“Coffee and the chance of running into a certain one-eyed demon?”

“Possibly.” Despite the phrasing, Mabel at least sounds like she’s trying to be accepting. Although it does sound sort of… sordid. When Mabel puts it like that. ‘One-eyed demon’. Seriously.

They do go into town, Mabel practically hanging out the window of Dipper’s car, shrieking over familiar sights as they drive. Dipper’s mind is still singing qubits, but his laptop is on the backseat and he opens it up when they get to the cafe. The place does waffles, and Mabel orders a stack, and just as Dipper is about to ask for a coffee, the pimple-faced kid from the other day rushes over.

“From Mr. Cipher,” he says, putting two cups down on the table. Dipper inspects them, but there’s no writing he can see, no puzzles or clues. The cups are just cups, a flat white for Dipper, and something obscene and laced with cream for Mabel.

She peers at it as if it’s going to bite. “Is it poison?”

Dipper takes a sip before handing it back. “It’s disgusting, is what it is,” he says. “You’ll love it.” And she does.

Bill doesn’t appear, and Dipper distracts himself from his disappointment by returning to his work. He has the sequence reconstructed in full. Now he just has to work out what it means.

* * *

The rest of the morning, they spend at Robbie’s. Mabel does her best to put on her bravest face, to thank Robbie for looking after her brother and her great uncle, but she lasts exactly as long as it takes to start looking at flower arrangements before she bursts into tears.

“Grunkle Stan would hate all of them,” she says between sobs.

They opt for no flowers, for a simple wooden casket, for a rabbi Robbie knows from two towns over. Mabel struggles with the idea of cremation, saying: “I think… I think it’s what he would’ve wanted.”

“Grandpa will freak out,” Dipper suggests. He’s not so sure about their parents. Honestly, he’s not so sure about  _himself_.

“I know,” Mabel says. “I just… there were…” She struggles for words in a way Dipper suspects have nothing to do with her tears. “There were reasons,” she finally says.

Dipper leaves the decision up to her. He leaves most of everything up to her, sitting with Robbie’s mom and pouring over catalogues and forms. He’s getting that feeling again, the hollow ache when he feels he should feel something for his great uncle’s death and doesn’t. So he goes to hang out by the water cooler in the hall, staring into nothing, thinking of golden moons and falling quantum.

“So this might not be the time for it, but I gotta ask: what the hell did you do to Eyeball?” And then Robbie is there, in the hall. His voice is teasing, not accusatory, and he’s wearing a smirk that matches neither his suit nor the decor.

“Did you see him?” is Dipper’s immediate reaction which, yeah. Nice way to play it cool.

Robbie notices, and laughs. “Man, you both got it  _bad_ ,” he says. “I’ve never seen Cipher so… mellow. He was practically smiling. Not grinning, mind you. Smiling. You know how weird is it to see a guy with shark teeth smile? Whatever you did to him, the whole town owes you one of these.” And he lifts his hand for a high-five.

Dipper obliges, and is pulled into an awkward hug for it. “Seriously though,” Robbie adds. “I’m happy for you both.”

“Thanks, man,” says Dipper, and means it. “But we wouldn’t’ve met if not for you and Tambry.”

Robbie waves the comment off. “Nah, Eyeball would’ve found a way. He’d been talking about you coming to town for a while. Since your great uncle died. I guess he must’ve heard about you up on One Percent Hill.” Which is… interesting, but Dipper doesn’t get time to process it, because Robbie adds: “Hey, that thing from the other day? Your two-Stan problem?”

Dipper glances to where Mabel is still talking to Ms. Valentino, too absorbed in eulogies and ribbons to be paying attention to her conspiring brother. Not that Dipper’s trying to exclude her. He just doesn’t want to upset her more than she already is, particularly if there’s nothing to be upset about. Robbie notices him looking, but says nothing, so Dipper prompts him to continue.

“You were right, man,” Robbie says. “Guy I got’s Stanley Pines, no doubt about it; different blood type. But according to every public record I could find, it’s Stan _ford_  that’s been living in Gravity Falls since computers used punch cards. And Stanley? He died forty years ago. But, get this: no body. Got written off as eaten by grizzlycorns or whatever after the accident. Mom and Dad did the memorial, they still remember ‘cause they thought it was off then, too. And the only guy who came to it? Stan Pines.”

There’s only really one place to go with that, and Dipper does so: “Great uncle Stan faked his own death and stole great uncle Ford’s identity.” He feels like the hole inside him is opening up, like he can see the edges of something rushing up from the bottom of it. Something black and writhing and terrible, on single slit-pupiled eye watching from the center.

“This is some  _Duck-tective_  bullshit right here, man.”

“But Ford wasn’t dead.” Dipper might not remember much from a decade ago, but he does remember this. “He just wasn’t. I  _knew_  him.”

“I dunno what to tell you about that,” Robbie says. “I believe you, but… this is what I got.” He makes a shrugging gesture, open-handed, as if in a physical show of his truthfulness.

So Dipper gives him a smile and another slap on the shoulder. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I know. Thanks, man. I appreciate it.”

“Any time,” Robbie says. Then: “You gonna tell your sister?”

Dipper glances back into the conference room. This time, Mabel catches his eye, gives him a sad little wave which he returns. “Yeah,” he says. “Of course. She’s my sister. Of course I’ll tell her.”

* * *

But he doesn’t.

It’s not intentional, not at first. When they get out of Valentino’s, this time it’s Mabel with someone waiting for her, in the form of Candy Chiu. The girls go off to spend the afternoon together, and Dipper drives alone back to his great uncle’s house. He’s half expecting Bill to suddenly appear, because suddenly appearing is Bill’s specialty, but that doesn’t happen either. Instead, when Dipper gets to the Mystery Shack, he finds a parcel sitting on the doorstep.

It’s from Bill. Or, at least Dipper’s pretty sure it is, given the label is written in Bill’s cipher, pun intended. The text is Dipper’s name, so he takes the box upstairs, sits in the attic window seat, and starts tearing paper.

The package itself is a reused box from one of the novelty knick-knacks that stocks the shelves downstairs. It’s been wrapped in brown paper, tied up in string, and filled with packing peanuts that spill out over Dipper and the cushions the second he opens the lid. He curses at the packaging, and halfway through rummaging around to clear it up, a USB thumb drive clatters to the floor. Dipper picks it up, looks at it, then goes to get his laptop.

The drive has two partitions, one of which is encrypted. The unencrypted partition is filled with thousands of text files, all of which contain what Dipper’s pretty sure are 3072-bit RSA keys. If he was going to guess, which he is, he’d say one of them decrypts the second partition. So he starts trying them, working through from 00001.pem. He gets to 00003.pem before the encrypted drive starts telling him he’s running out of guesses and that, when he does, the whole thing is going to be wiped.

There has to be another clue. He’s pretty sure Bill wouldn’t have give him an insoluble puzzle, nor something he’d need special equipment to crack. So…

There’s nothing else remarkable about the drive itself, no hidden files or secret steganography. The brown paper is just brown paper, with the exception of Dipper’s name. He supposes there could be something in that. Some letters-to-numbers substitution to find the right .pem file. Except that would seem to rely on Dipper remembering the solution to the puzzle from days ago which, truth be told, he doesn’t. And, also, the file names are five digits long, while DIPPER is six. It all seems a bit too convoluted, so Dipper puts it aside, instead going back to staring at what he’s got.

In the end, he gets the idea to count the packing peanuts. It’s a pain-in-the-ass task; there are a lot of the things, and they’ve fallen into Dipper’s pockets and down the back of the sofa cushions. Mostly, it’s the inconvenience that convinces him he’s got it right.

About fifteen minutes later, he’s pretty sure there are six hundred and eighteen of the damn things. So Dipper tries 00618.pem.

The second partition decrypts.

This partition has one file, a .png. Dipper opens it, and finds a photo of… he’s not sure what it is. Some kind of triangular plaque or bas relief, except the picture doesn’t make sense. He stares at it for a long time, trying to work it out—trying to work out why it feels  _familiar_ —before he notices the image is well over 200 MB in size.

Dipper’s pretty sure a single photo shouldn’t be over 200 MB.

He has a steganography app buried on his hard drive somewhere, a leftover from a first year class. Which is convenient, because the internet at his great uncle’s place is terrible, and he wasn’t looking forward to having to download something new.

The app takes a long time to run across the image, because of the size, and he stares at the little blue progress bar as it slowly fills. Wonders what the hell this could possibly be, why Bill—he’s still assuming the sender is Bill—would be leaving things like this on Dipper’s doorstep. Just to keep him occupied for an afternoon? Why? Dipper can think of much more exciting ways they could be occupied, and is doing so, in detail, when the app finishes.

There’s a video file hidden in the image. It’s called LASTNIGHT.MOV. Dipper opens it.

It’s a corridor in Northwest Manor, filmed in portrait, as if from a cell phone. Whomever is holding the camera is moving slowly, to hide outside a half-opened study door. Figures are just visible through the gap. Dipper recognizes Gideon Gleeful. And he recognizes his sister.

Hands shaking, heart hammering, he hits the laptop’s unmute button.

“—as I supposed to do?” Gideon, voice calm but with an edge of imploring to it. “You know exactly what happened with Stanford. The man nearly destroyed this town and the whole world. More than once. Was I supposed to just stand around and watch history repeat itself?”

“Don’t you dare.” Mabel, voice furious. “Don’t you  _dare_. Dipper would never—”

“We both know that’s not true, Mabel. Stanford Pines was an adult when the portal got him. Dipper was a child.  _I_  was a child. You don’t know what it’s like. All that power, all that knowledge. The apple and the snake, all in one. It destroys people. It destroyed your great uncle, it destroyed me, and it would’ve destroyed your brother, too. It was only a matter of time.”

“Dipper is better than that.” And he doesn’t want to hear the uncertainty in Mabel’s voice. He just doesn’t.

“It’s not about being ‘better’. It’s about the nature of the disease. And make no mistake, it is a disease; a cancer of the soul. It took me seven years locked in a jail cell to get my head clear. And even now, if I get too close to the rift… I can hear it calling, Mabel. All the time. And my exposure was only a fraction of your brother’s.” A pause. Then: “I’m not… proud of what I’ve done. But I did what I had to. For the town, and the world.”

Another long, awful silence. Then Mabel: “And Bill Cipher?”

Gideon paces, Dipper can see the cloud-platinum and sky-blue flashes as he cross the doorway, over and over. “Cipher has been terrorizing this town for generations. I removed a threat, yes.”

“Maybe you haven’t noticed, but he’s not exactly ‘removed’. Not when he’s boning my  _brother_ , Gideon, what the  _hell_?”

“Cipher is… contained,” Gideon says. “For all intents and purposes, he’s human. With no more power or reach than any other.”

“Boning. My. Brother.”

“That was… My options with Cipher were limited. Trapping demons… imagine being bound, motionless, inside a coffin for all eternity. No sight or smell or hearing or touch. Nothing but the screaming inside your own head. All prisons are imperfect, and Cipher is mad enough as it is. I couldn’t take the risk that he’d escape, more dangerous than he went in. But there was a man, Ergman Bratsman. He had a device, human cloning, I—”

“Wait, wait wait. Are you… are you telling me Bill Cipher is a Sev’ral Timez clone?”

“Ah. You know… yes, yes of course you do. And, yes. Originally. We…” Gideon stops. Dipper can see him, just in front of the door, rubbing a hand against his eyes as if to ward off a headache. “Cipher found it difficult to adjust to the realities of inhabiting a human body full-time. He’d claw out his eye over and over until we found a way to alter the DNA to stop it growing. Then it was the teeth. Something about the square shape. I’d find him in the bathroom, blood all over the counter from where he’d—” A gesture, Gideon miming hitting himself in the mouth. “Against the basin edge. Trying to knock them out. We fixed that in the end, too.”

“Oh, god…” Mabel sounds like she’s going to be sick. Dipper knows the feeling.

“Even now, he’s self-destructive and masochistic. He barely eats, barely sleeps, barely interacts with others. And yes, he has an obsession with your brother. He has for years. It’s… part of his nature, I think. And yes, I encouraged him to pursue it. Perhaps it wasn’t fair of me, but… But your brother is a good man, Mabel. I can make Bill Cipher look human but I can’t make him feel it. Your brother, it seems, can. If it wasn’t a good option it was still the best I had. I don’t expect you to forgive me for the things I’ve done, but at least now you understand my reasoning.”

There’s a pause, long and awful and silent. Somewhere outside, Dipper hears a bird, calling into the forest.

Then, from the tinny laptop speakers:

“Mabel?”

“I… I need to think about all this.”

“Of course. Take your time.”

“Dipper. Oh, Dipper…”

And then the footage cuts.

Dipper stares at the black player window for a long time. Then he re-watches the clip. Then again.

And again.

And again.

* * *

He’s still curled up with his laptop in the attic window seat when Mabel comes home, hours later.

“Dip-per, I’m ho-ome!” she calls, voice bright and happy in a way that makes Dipper’s blood boil and his head ache.

He’s spent the afternoon working on the second cipher, the one from his dreams. It’s not complex, not by the standards of what it is, and Dipper is sure he’s close to breaking it.

“I bought stuff for din-ner!”

“I’m working!” Dipper snaps the words, too sharp and too harsh. But all he can hear running over and over in his head is the doubt in his sister’s voice.  _Dipper is better than that_ , she’d said. But she hadn’t meant it.

She’s moving around downstairs, banging pots and pans, opening and closing doors. The sound grates, makes him jump. His  _sister_. And Gideon. And stupid, oblivious Dipper, waxing nostalgic with Pacifica. Dipper and his memory full of holes, and Gravity Falls with its secrets. And something is going on, he knows it, he can feel the threads of it, so close to connecting but for a single missing piece, the missing piece of Dipper’s memory.

Except missing is the wrong word, he thinks. “Stolen” is better.

His sister knew. He keeps coming back to that. She knew, or at least suspected, something was wrong. For years. And she let it slide, let Dipper forget… what? He doesn’t even know what. Something huge. Something about Gravity Falls, about Bill, about great uncle Ford. About clones and… and a boy band? Dipper doesn’t even… No, wait. His sister used to have a story about that. Something about keeping blond-haired blue-eyed singers in a hamster cage, about hiding them in her bedroom and releasing them into the wilderness and…

And this is insane. All of it. 

Dipper has a sudden image of Bill, grinning. Empty eye socket and toothless mouth, blood pouring down his cheek and chin.

“Dip-per! Your food’s gonna get cold.”

“I said I’m  _working_.”

And he is. So close to the one thing he can do, the one puzzle he can solve. And he does, even as he hears his sister’s footsteps, coming up the stairs, kets and qubits dissolving into superdense ASCII that resolves into a message:

TRUST NO ONE

“Bro-bro, you okay up here?”

Dipper slams the minimize button, even as Mabel’s face appears over the top of his laptop. Her eyes are big and bright and round beneath neon eyeshadow, her lips slightly parted, tongue resting against her top teeth in the way Dipper knows she does when she’s worried. Worried about him, he supposes. Worried that he’ll find out about her little conspiracy with Gideon Gleeful.

“What’re you working on?” She peers down over the laptop, and Dipper is about to yank it back from her, to snap it shut and hide it, when she says, “Ooh. I remember this thing!”

It’s the picture from before, the one he extracted the video from. He still can’t work out what it is, and he has a jolt of panic when Mabel pulls the laptop from his hands.

“Hey! Give that—!”

“Here. You’re looking at it all wrong.” She turns the laptop upside down, then hands it back. The picture that, before, looked like a tangled mess, resolves into a figure. Dipper stares at it.

“It’s in the town museum,” Mabel explains. “We noticed it only made sense upside down when we were kids. I guess… I guess you don’t remember.”

“No.” Dipper closes the laptop.

“Dipper… Are you okay? Did something happen?” Mabel is very close, and she looks… she looks like his sister. Like the other half of his soul, like the woman he’s known as long as he’s known life.

She also looks like someone who hasn’t gotten very much sleep. Like someone who’s spent a lot of time crying.

Dipper says:

“I’m okay. I’ll be down in a bit.”

Which earns him another long, careful look. But in the end, Mabel says: “Okay. Don’t be too long.” And then she’s gone, back down the creaking staircase.

Dipper waits until her can’t hear her footsteps any longer, and then he re-opens his laptop, re-summons the cipher from his dream. The message is still there, TRUST NO ONE, writ bold and plain. But there’s something else, too. Another block of jumbled-up qubits that still won’t make sense. Dipper looks at it, and he looks at the key that decrypted the fist chunk, and he looks at the inverted image. He flips the latter, in the graphic program this time, and once again the mess resolves into the figure of an angel.

Then he goes back to the cipher, inverts the first key, and reapplies it to the second chunk of encrypted text. And now? Now he’s staring at the full message. And it reads:

TRUST NO ONE

(EXCEPT YOUR SISTER, YOU IDIOT)

Dipper sucks in a sharp breath. He stares at the text for a while. Then closes the laptop, goes into his room, and gets a pen.

* * *

He’s no great artist, but for this, he doesn’t have to be.

“What is this?”

Mabel looks up from her bowl, spaghetti sauce smeared across her chin. It’s endearingly adorable for the half second it takes her to realize, to scrub it away with the back of her hand and concentrate on the notebook Dipper is holding out.

She takes the notebook, looks at what Dipper’s drawn, then looks at Dipper. He can see something rising behind her eyes. Something like fear, maybe. Or pity.

There’s a second bowl of spaghetti on the kitchen table, and he sits down behind it. Starts eating, and this must be a good sign because Mabel says:

“Where did you see this?”

“It talks to me,” Dipper says. “In my dreams.”

“Since when?”

“Since I got here.” The spaghetti is pretty good. Mabel’s had Italian roommates over in London. He figures they must’ve been giving her lessons.

“What… what does it say?”

Dipper shrugs. “I don’t always remember. I know we sat and watch a pine tree burn once.”

“A… pine tree?”

“It was in a forest,” Dipper explains. “I saw a meteor hit it, and it burst into flames. That”—he indicates the notebook—“told me it ‘wasn’t a very subtle metaphor’.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know.” Then he says: “Sometimes, when Bill is mad or being obnoxious, his voice sounds almost identical to what I remember from my dreams. I thought it was a cute coincidence, just my mind crushing hard on the hot dude. But it’s not, is it?” Dipper isn’t stupid. Sometimes, part of not being stupid is not thinking to hard about certain things, lest the world start making too much sense. Sometimes.

Mabel says: “No. No it’s not.” She puts the notebook down. “I’m sorry, Dipper.”

Dipper doesn’t want sorry. Dipper wants answers. “Why can my boyfriend get into my head when I sleep?” A pause. “And why does he look like an anthropomorphic triangle when he does?”

Mabel doesn’t answer. Instead, she asks, “Where… where have you been sleeping?”

“Here,” Dipper says. “And, see. That’s another funny thing. The first night I was in town, when I got drunk with Robbie and Tambry, Bill drove me home. We were in the woods, and I nearly fell asleep in the car.”

Mabel’s intake of breath is short and sharp and fearful.

“He woke me up,” Dipper adds. “With a fist to the shoulder.” He pulls up the sleeve of his t-shirt, to where the big greenish-yellow bruise is still fading. “Then he said something about never sleeping outside this house, lest I ‘ruin everything’. So I haven’t been.”

“But… but when you sleep, you’ve still been seeing…” Mabel gestures at the notebook.

“Yes.” A pause. Then: “Mabel. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Not everything. But… but Bill shouldn’t be able to get into your head  _at all_ , not if you’re here.”

“Why not?”

“This place is… protected. Grunkle Stan and great uncle Ford… They had secrets, Dipper. Ones you don’t remember.”

“Why did Stan fake his own death and steal Ford’s identity?”

Mabel sighs. “That’s… complicated.”

“But it happened?”

“Yes. A long time ago, now.”

“I knew great uncle Ford.”

“Yeah.”

“He was here when we were here ten years ago. But there are no photos of him in the house.” There are photos of Stan and of Dipper and of Mabel, but none of Ford.

Except: “Of course there are,” Mabel counters. “Grunkle Stan had to hide them. He had to hide a lot of things about Ford.”

“Why? And don’t tell me it’s ‘complicated’ again, please. Give me some credit.”

This earns him a scowl. “I’m  _trying_ , Dipper,” Mabel snaps. “I really am, but what do you want from me? Every time I’ve tried to talk to you about this stuff you shut me down and brush me off, or accuse me of lying or being hysterical! Don’t you think I don’t know how crazy it sounds? I do! But it happened. It happened, and you were there, and I was there, but you don’t remember. Only I do. And I’ve… I’ve spent practically half my life trying to work out  _why_. Trying to remind myself it was real, that I’m not just making it up. That…” She trails off, breath catching in her throat.

Dipper looks away. He hates to see his sister cry. Hates even more to know he’s the reason for it.

“Gideon wants to buy this place,” he says.

“I’m not surprised. He’s wanted it since we were all kids.”

“I overheard your conversation with him the other night. At the Northwests’.”

Another sharp intake of breath, Mabel swinging around to face him, tears tracing mascara-dark streaks down her cheeks. “Dipper, I—”

He holds up a hand, and she falls silent. “There are too many secrets in this place,” he says. “Too many people invested in things staying hidden.”

This earns him a broken half of a smile. “Welcome to Gravity Falls,” Mabel says. “‘Trust no one’ is practically the town motto.”

He doesn’t return the smile. Just says: “The other day, Bill asked me a question. He asked what I’d do, if the choice was to either believe the world is just as mad as you say it is, or to go back to my old life, pretending nothing is wrong.”

“What… what did you tell him?”

“I said you’re my sister. That I’d never leave you to deal with something like that alone.” Dipper looks away, can’t meet his sister’s eyes as he says: “But I did, didn’t I? I abandoned you years ago. And I didn’t even notice.” And this is the core of it, the meteor-hot ball of rage that’s burning in his gut.

“Dipper…”

“Well, I’ve had enough. I don’t wanna be that guy any more. So.” He looks up, at his sister. Tries to put every ounce of anger and determination he can find in his gaze as he says: “I believe you, Mabel. Everything. About the gnomes, and the candy monster, and Wax Larry King, and Mermando, and defeating zombies with karaoke… everything. I believe it, and I believe I was there, and I believe I don’t remember it because someone’s made me forget. And, Mabel? I am so. So. Fucking. Angry. They messed with my  _head_. And I don’t even know why.”

Mabel is quiet for a moment. Then she sniffs, and says:

“Come with me. It’ll be easier if I show you.”

* * *

Three straight lines and a circle. A hole in the world and a door behind the vending machine, Dipper’s hand held tight within his sister’s.

Down beneath the earth, Mabel tells him everything. And Dipper  _believes_.

* * *

“Mabel?”

It’s early. Very early. Dipper’s arms are wrapped tight around his sister’s shoulders, the only solid thing in his world.

“Yes?” They’re both whispering. In the dark, surrounded by the insanity of a life Dipper can no longer remember leading, but knows in his heart that he did.

“Gre— Grunkle Stan. I’ve seen the death certificate. It was a car crash, but, Mabel? He fell asleep. He fell asleep outside the Shack.”

Three straight lines and a circle, and a slit-torn pupil as black as a hole in the world.

Mabel chokes back a sob. That night, they don’t sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Choo choo! All aboard the 6:15 Angst Train from B-Plotsville! Have some [sound](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxIiPLVR6NA) while you travel!


	7. Day 9

“Thanks for seeing us so early.” Dipper is running on no sleep and adrenaline, animated by a combination of fear and rage he’s trying desperately to keep out of his voice and his expression.

“Not a problem. I know this has been a trying time for both of you. No need to drag it out more than it has to.” Either his expression is convincing or Gideon’s a better liar than Dipper will ever be, or both. They’re in a small study at Northwest Manor. Pacifica is nowhere to be found, and the fact that Bill is standing in the corner and won’t make eye contact isn’t reassuring Dipper that this is going to be an easy encounter.

Not that Dipper wants to make eye contact with Bill. Right now, Dipper doesn’t want to make anything contact with Bill. Dipper doesn’t even want to  _think_  about Bill.

“Dipper told me about your offer on the Mystery Shack.” Mabel. She’s wearing wraparound sunglasses and Grunkle Stan’s old fez. Dipper has Ford’s tan trench-coat but, more importantly, a power glove tucked into an inside pocket. He’s sill not quite sure how it works. He’s still hoping he won’t have to use it.

“Of course, of course.” Gideon’s piggish little eyes are living up to his family name, even if the rest of his face is calm and placid. Not for the first time, Dipper wonders what it is about the Mystery Shack he wants so badly.

“But first,” Mabel says, “we have a question.”

Gideon gestures for her to continue.

“It’s about Grunkle Stan’s death,” Dipper adds. 

“So tragic,” Gideon says. “Falling asleep at the wheel. Such a shame.”

“It seems to be a common thing around here,” Mabel adds. “We looked it up—”

“Google is an amazing thing,” Dipper interjects.

“—and, did you know, that fatigue has been the leading cause of death in Gravity Falls for, oh. About how long was it, Dip?”

“Why, about since a certain Mr. Gideon Gleeful got out of jail.”

There’s a pause, long and awful. Then Gideon smiles, as sweet as HFCS, and says: “Just what, exactly, are you implying, you adorable little Duck-tectives, you?”

“We’re not implying anything,” Mabel says. “We’re saying it. You killed Grunkle Stan.”

There’s a part of him, Dipper realizes, that’s hoping they’re wrong. That Gideon is going to do… something, anything, that will convince them of his innocence. Show some sort of genuine upset, or horror, or outrage. Some chink in his armor, some vulnerability. Gideon’s been so nice since Dipper got back, and Dipper doesn’t want to believe it’s fake. Doesn’t want to believe it was an act. He wants to think better than that. Better of Gideon, and of himself.

But Gideon just folds his hands and says: “Now. How on God’s green Earth do you think I managed that?” And Dipper’s heart falls.

If Mabel’s had any such disappointment, her voice doesn’t show it. “Um, hello?” She gestures to the corner of the room. “Dream demon? Standing right there?” And if Bill makes some reaction, Dipper doesn’t see it. He’s too busy slamming his eyes shut. Too busy trying to fight down the rising bile in his throat.

Gideon must notice, and he chuckles, light and airy. “That’s a mighty interesting theory you got there, miss Mabel. Perhaps you should take it to my friends in the Sheriff’s office, see how the good ol’ boys like it. You never know. They might even ask you how it went down. And maybe you could tell them. Say perhaps your dear late great uncle had had a few too many at the ol’ watering hole. Stayed out a mite too late. Not as young as he used to be. Say perhaps he never left the bar. Perhaps he dozed off then and there in front of the game, fingers curled around his empty glass. And maybe, just maybe, when he woke up? Why, maybe that wasn’t Stanford Pines at all. Maybe it was something else, something fitted into his skin like a hand into an itty bitty Stan Pines glove. And perhaps that hand walked that little glove right out the door of that there bar, hopped right into Mr. Mystery’s lil’ ol’ car, and then drove him right off a lil’ ol’ cliff. Wouldn’t that make for such a fanciful story? You could sell it to Hollywood. They would just lap that nonsense right up. But our fine upstanding local boys in brown? Well now. I’m thinking you might just have a harder sell on your hands.”

It’s as good as a confession as they’re going to get, Dipper knows. He also knows it’s useless, completely useless. Because Gideon is right; who on Earth is going to believe them?

“You should’ve taken my deal,” Gideon continues. “I’m a reasonable man. You would’ve been fairly compensated for your property, then you’d have been free to go back to your lil’ lives. Your lil’ fashion shows, your—if you’ll excuse my pun—lil’ ciphers. Speaking of which, I am not heartless. I even would’ve allowed you… conjugal visits with my own one of the same. He’s very fond of you, you know. You make him so happy, and my daddy always said: a happy worker is a productive worker. Isn’t that right, Billy-boy?”

“Shut  _up_!” Dipper’s had enough. When he opens his eyes, Gideon is still sitting behind his desk, hands primly folded. Looking as calm and as smug as he ever did behind his piggy little eyes and ridiculous silver hair. “You’re a monster,” Dipper says. “You always were, and you always will be.”

“Mr. Pines— You don’t mind if I call you that, do you? Given your great uncle seems to’ve relinquished the title?” He’s not really looking for an answer, and Dipper doesn’t give one. Just grinds his teeth as Gideon continues: “Mr. Pines, I don’t expect someone of your… lineage to understand. But I do what I do to protect this town, protect this world, from people like you. Little boys who pick at scabs until they bleed, heedless of the scars they leave behind. This town is a scar, Mr. Pines. And I will not,  _not_  do you hear me, allow you to stop its wound from healing.”

“You’ll never have the Mystery Shack,” Mabel says. Dipper doesn’t think he’s ever heard his sister so angry. Her voice sounds ready to turn flesh to stone. “You’ll have to kill us, first.”

Dipper’s not entirely sure this is the best thing she could’ve said, but all Gideon does is sigh. “So uncivilized,” he says. Then: “Bill. Deal with them both.”

“We had a deal, kid.”

For one panicked moment, Dipper makes the mistake of looking at Bill. He instantly wishes he hadn’t; if he was expecting to find something there, some trace of guilt or remorse or humanity, he doesn’t. Bill is as alien as Dipper’s ever seen him, in dreams or outside of them. As cold a bullion and as unfathomable as the dark place between sleep and dream.

“Bill,” Gideon’s tone is warning. “Now now, we talked about this.” He hand goes to his collar.

“Pine Tree is mine,” Bill insists. “That was the deal.”

Gideon rolls his eyes. He gives Dipper a smile, an indulgent patriarch dealing with the demands of a tiny child. “Demons,” he says. “They can be very… unimaginative about some things. I find it helps to always be fair, but firm.” And he pulls something out of his shirt collar. A little brass bell on a leather cord. When he rings it, Bill bites back a groan, slumping against the wall, one arm wrapped around his waist, the other against his head.

Dipper’s heard that sound before. Oh yes he has.

“Now,” Gideon says. “I said ‘deal with them’, and I meant ‘deal with them’.” He stops ringing the bell, and Bill uncurls. Dipper gets halfway out of his chair, hears his sister do the same. Then Gideon snaps the fingers of his free hand. There’s flare of light, cold and blue, flames bursting to life around Gideon’s hand even as a second eye—or a representation thereof—opens above Bill’s eyepatch.

“You tried, Pine Tree,” Bill says. “But this plan was stupid.” And then his body slumps to the ground.

By the time Dipper realizes why, he can already feel something slam into him. Cold and endless, a golden roaring and the sound of a thousand wings, beating in the dark. He knows he’s felt this before, even if he can’t remember where, and when his head clears he find himself looking up into his own leering, grinning face.

Dipper is out of his body, and Bill is in it.

Somewhere to the side, he hears his sister scream.

Bill hears it, too, and he lunges for her, and the two of them go flying across the room in a crash.

“Mabel!” Dipper screams and tries to go after them, tries to grab onto Bill’s shoulders—his own shoulders—to haul the demon away from his sister. But his hands pass through flesh as if it doesn’t exist. Or, perhaps more rightly, like he doesn’t.

“Get  _off_  me, Bipper!” Mabel punctuates the sentence with a knee to a place that makes Dipper wince. It makes Bill wince more, enough for Mabel to shove him away. To lunge for her own handbag. “Dipper, catch!” she cries, and then something is flying through the air.

She doesn’t get his position right, and the thing hits the ground; the Dipper sock puppet they’d found the other day. Except not quite, because this one looks new, is wearing the clothes of his adult self. Dipper grabs for it, finds he can feel the cotton under his fingers, and pulls it over his hand.

“Why do you have this in your purse?” he has it say.

“For exactly this reason, Dipper!” She has something else in her purse, too, and for a moment Dipper thinks it’s a gun. Then he sees the clawed end to it, and knows it for what it really is; Mabel’s grappling hook.

She’s lining it up, about to fire at Gideon, when Bill slaps it out of her hand. The sight of his own body slapping his own sister is too much, and Dipper might be nothing but a disembodied hand but a disembodied hand can still throw a punch. So he does, hitting Bill—hitting himself—in the side of the head.

Bill reels from the hit, but he’s laughing, eyes white rings wrapping the whole way around the pupil. He grabs Dipper’s wrist, as if he’s strangling the puppet, and then Dipper has the oddest sensation as they end up wrestling across the floor. Odd, because he keeps passing through his own body, and at least once he thinks his foot hits something solid.

From the other side of the room, he can hear his sister yelling. Then a gunshot—a real gun, not the grappling hook—and a scream.

“Mabel!”

The distraction earns him a punch in the fist, which is weird, but also hurts. He can’t see what Mabel is doing—whether she’s even still alive—and he might not have adrenalin right now, but panic works just as well on ghosts. Enough for a bust of strength that wrenches him free of Bill’s grip, and when his knuckles connect with Bill’s jaw, Dipper howls victory.

He lines up for another punch, but Bill grabs his hand again. He’s still laughing his horrible laugh, crowing out in an awful sing-song: “Stop hitting yourself! You’ll regret it later!”

And then another sound, and this one Dipper does recognize as the grappling hook. Then Mabel’s voice, laced with pain but still defiant: “Don’t  _touch_  me you big-headed creep!” Then a Ms. Piggy-style karate screech, and the sound of a body hitting the wall.

And then, a moment later:

“Oh, Bi-ii-ii-ill Cii-ii-ipher. Lookie what I’ve got!”

Bill looks, so does Dipper. It’s Mabel, standing over the fallen body of Gideon Gleeful, a little brass bell held aloft in victory.

Bill  _howls_ , a mad laugh that feels like it’s splitting Dipper’s soul. Then he’s on his feet. “Good enough!” he says. Dipper lunges after him, but too late, and Bill is hauling his own unconscious body off the ground, throwing it over his current shoulder. “Run, meatsacks!” Then he’s raising his hand, and even in his disembodied state Dipper can feel the power glove as it begins to charge. He has no idea when Bill pulled it on, and screams a moment later when the beam discharges, right through him.

It tickles, and when Dipper looks down, he sees a hole cut clean through his middle. Through the hole, he can see the office door, exploded to splinters but, truth be told, he’s too busy screaming to pay it much attention.

“Stop whining, you’ll be fine.” Then strong fingers are closing around Dipper’s wrist again, and Bill is hauling him out of the room. “Make like a star and shoot, kid!” This to Mabel, who’s already running.

Somewhere behind them, Gideon screams, “Stop them! Stop them!” Dipper decides not to stick around long enough to find out who he’s talking to.

They get outside the short way, which involves Bill blasting holes in walls with the glove until they see daylight. Then they’re heading for Dipper’s old Toyota, even as a group of men in black suits pour out behind them.

“The keys!” Mabel screams. “Dipper has the keys!” She lunges for Bill’s pockets, without breaking stride.

“I’m flattered, kid, but this is wrong for too many reasons.” His voice is wheezing pretty hard, and it occurs to Dipper he may be a teeny bit out of shape.

Mabel doesn’t notice. Is too busy yelling, “Shut up, Bipper!” even as she grabs the keys from his pocket and hits the unlock button. The car lights flash, and then everyone is opening doors; Mabel in the driver’s seat, Bill throwing his own body on the backseat before jumping into the front. Then they’re off, screaming as the back window explodes and a bullet goes whizzing through the cabin.

“I’m used to driving on the le-ee-ee-eft!” Mabel, recently of London, England, yells.

Dipper is watching the men chasing after them when he feels a hand grab his shoulder. “Tag, you’re it!” says Bill, and for a moment they’re eye to single golden eye. Then Dipper’s entire world lurches, and suddenly his lungs are burning and his jaw aches and he’s back in his own body.

He whirls around, just in time to see Bill’s eye flicker open on the backseat. Bill raises his hands in front of his face, snapping black fingers. Sparks of blue flare for an instant, but are gone in a heartbeat. “Ah well,” says Bill, to no one in particular. “Halfway there.”

The sound of gunshots follows them out of the Manor and down the hill.

* * *

When they get back to it, the Shack is on fire. So it’s time for more panic and screaming, Dipper on his cell phone trying to get reception for 911, Mabel finding the extinguisher and getting to work.

The blaze isn’t big, burning on the floor of the gift shop amidst the reek of gasoline. They do what they can to contain it, buckets of water and closed doors, and somewhere in the frenzy it occurs to Dipper they’ve lost sight of Bill.

“Where’s Cipher?”

“What?”

“Cipher. Where is he?”

Mabel’s eyebrows jump up beneath her bangs, and Dipper whirls around three times before he notices the door behind the vending machine is open.

“Son of a—” he starts, and gets halfway across the gift shop before Bill comes barreling back out of the dark. He’s holding two devices, one he tosses to Mabel, the other he keeps for himself as he goes darting out of the room. He’s fast, even with the limp, and Dipper can hear the uneven  _thud-thunk_  of him vanishing up the stairs.

“Mabel,” he says. “The bell. Give me the bell.”

Behind him, he hears a whooshing noise, and suddenly the room is a whole lot cooler. When he looks, he sees Mabel brandishing what can only be a freeze ray, grinning as she obliterates the fire under a layer of frost.

“Mabel!”

“Right, right.” And then the bell is sailing through the air. Dipper fumbles the catch, the thing hitting the wood and bouncing across the floor. It’s silent as it does so, and Dipper realizes this is because it has no clanger. Otherwise, it’s about an inch high, and covered with tiny writing in a language Dipper doesn’t know. It feels magic, a prickly static under Dipper’s fingers, and he slings the cord around his neck as he heads up the stairs. Whatever Bill’s doing, this time, Dipper is going to be ready.

As it turns out, Bill is setting up some strange device out on the ledge overlooking the forest. A black tripod with a black rod attached to the top, a red light blinking on the end.

“Step away from the device, Cipher!” Dipper’s jaw aches when he talks and he tries to press every inch of that pain into anger, to push it back out at Bill. 

But Bill just rolls his eye. “Calm down, Pine Tree.” He does something else to the side of the blinking rod, and the light begins to speed up.

“I’m serious! Get back!” The bell is in Dipper’s hand and he can feel the energy crackle across the metal.

Bill eyes the bell. He’s hard to read but Dipper thinks that, just for a moment, he sees a flash of fear. Fear, and something else. “Don’t,” Bill says. “Don’t make it all a lie.” And he goes to touch the blinking light.

Dipper rings the bell. Despite the lack of clanger, he hears the chime it makes, bright and clear and far, far too cheerful for the grimace it elicits from Bill. For the way he crumples into himself, stumbling to one knee, breath choking in big angry sobs even as he snarls, “Fuck. You.” And slams his hand down on the button.

Dipper feels the machine pulse, an electrostatic burst that sends every hair in his body standing on end. He feels a sharp pain at his thigh—his phone, he thinks—and, down below, his car alarm makes a choked sound before it dies.

Dipper’s Toyota, he knows, is not the only thing that’s going to die.

“You monster!” Hitting Bill still feels good. Real good, particularly given, this time, Dipper’s hitting Bill’s actual jaw. It’s gonna leave a mark, even if Bill manages to catch the second one, face inches from Dipper’s own, sharp teeth flashing. A knee to the gut later, and Bill is going down, strong fingers bringing Dipper with him as he does. And then the world is rolling, over and over and over, mud and grass and roof tiles, and Dipper’s fingers catch on the guttering. Just.

He nearly loses his grip a moment later when gravity kicks in, and his shoulder is the only thing between the ground and the combined body weight of himself and Bill. It hurts, and he cries out, and Bill’s arm is around his neck, and he’s just had  _enough_. So he bites, hard enough to get a mouthful of filthy metallic demon blood, and Bill snarls, “Ooh, foreplay. Kinky.”

Dipper punches him in the face with his free hand. The angle is awkward but it works, and Bill drops. Barely his own body length, and Dipper follows him down, landing on his feet in the way Bill doesn’t.

Bill, who’s on the ground, having trouble getting upright without putting weight on his bad leg. He shoots Dipper a look that is such pure wounded malevolence that Dipper has to laugh.

“What is  _wrong_  with you?” Bill snarls, spitting blood.

Dipper can’t believe what he’s hearing. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to. He can deal with the teeth and the eye and even the weird triangle thing. He can’t deal with this. Can’t deal with Bill standing in front of him like the bastard feels nothing for what he’s done.

“You stole my  _life_!” Dipper says.

“It was three months and barely that!” Bill counters. “I don’t see what—”

“You stole my life and you  _murdered my great uncle_!”

“I drove his stinking meatsack off a cliff! But, that doesn’t mean he’s dead. It just—”

“That’s how it works with humans you fucked-up corn chip!” He’s pretty sure, this time, when he hits it, something in Bill’s face dislocates. The bastard goes down heavy, and Dipper doesn’t let him get back up. Not with his shoe in the monster’s gut and his hand on the bell and everything is red and white and black and  _furious_. Furious at Bill and furious at himself, that he actually  _felt_  something for this inhuman sack of shit, this monster who played him, straight from the fucking start, for Dipper’s whole fucking  _life_  and—

“Dipper! Dipper, stop it!”

It’s only the sound of his sister’s voice, the feel of his sister’s hands, cool against his overheated skin, that brings Dipper back into himself.

He stumbles, spine hitting hard against the wall of the Shack. His breath comes in ragged pants, his throat feels like he’s been gargling glass and his cheeks are hot with tears. He feels like something’s broken, somewhere deep inside. Some burst dam, some opened sinkhole.

There’s a groan at his feet, and he looks down. Bill is a bloodied mess, slowly uncurling on the grass. His eye won’t focus, and his voice wheezes with inhaled blood, but he still manages to say: “‘Only thing that matters in the end’ huh, Pine Tree?”

“Fuck you,” Dipper says, and spits.

Bill’s unhinged laughing follows him the whole way into the Shack.

* * *

If nothing else, at least there’s plenty of ice.

Dipper nurses his wounds in the basement. It’s dark and dank and a wreck, which he finds poetically equivalent to his life. Someone’s trashed the place, drawers and cupboards thrown open, books and devices and photographs strewn across the floor. Dipper has no idea what they could’ve been looking for. No idea if they found it or not. He’s pretty sure he knows who to blame, pretty sure about the way the vending machine had been cut away from the wall. Pretty sure that the fire was supposed to’ve covered up evidence of the break-in.

One broken vending machine and a whole avalanche of Doritos bags. Dipper eats them until he feels like throwing up, his jaw aching with each bite.

He hopes that, wherever Bill is, he’s feeling a hell of a lot worse. Physically, anyway. Dipper’s no longer convinced the monster can feel anything else.

Whomever broke in wasn’t after Ford’s journals, and Dipper goes through them until he finds what he’s looking for; a diagram of a bell without a clanger. A Demon Bell, inscribed with the encrypted true name of a demon.

This is Bill’s bell, Bill’s name, and if Dipper owns it, that means he owns Bill.

If he can manage to decode the text, can know Bill’s true name without the layer of obfuscation, then he owns the demon. Period. No bell needed.

He’s studying the symbols when Mabel finds him.

“It was an EMP,” she says. “Gideon had cameras and microphones all around the shack. Now he doesn’t.”

Dipper figured this out, too. At about the time he looked at his mobile phone and found it fried. The only devices that survived were either down here, sheltered by the bunker, or such mad science magitech that they weren’t affected.

“What do you want me to say, Mabel?”

Mabel just makes a noise, halfway between frustration and disgust, arms out as if pleading to the heavens.

“I have to take Bill to the hospital,” she finally says. “He needs stitches. At least.” Dipper’s pretty sure the accusation can be seen from space.

“He murdered Grunkle Stan.”

“He was being  _tortured_ , Dipper. By Gideon. For  _years_. Are you seriously going to blame him?”

“Aren’t you?”

Mabel’s lips get very thin and very pale, even through the smeared lipstick. “Not like this,” she says eventually. “We’ll be back when we’re back. Try not to get killed by Gideon while we’re gone.” Then she turns to leave.

“Mabel! You can’t be serious!” Dipper scrambles to his feet, grabs the bell from around his neck. “He’s dangerous, Mabel. Take this.”

Mabel looks at him like he’s trying to offer her the severed head of the world’s cutest piglet. 

“Mabel, please.”

Mabel’s eyes are big and bright, and even the gloom Dipper can see the tears track down her cheeks. “Goodbye, Dipper.”

Then she’s gone, and Dipper is alone.

He stands there for a long time, looking at the bell. Then he finds a pen and a blank notebook amongst the ruins, and gets to work.

* * *

This time, when he gets to the clearing, the tree is gone; nothing but ash and embers in its wake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Aa-aa-aa-aa-aa-aa-angst](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsd6slFJgKc)!
> 
> The scene with Gideon and the song above, incidentally, were the plotbunnies that sparked this fic. Just, yanno. In case you were wondering.
> 
> Bonus content: When I'm not writing, I'm doing bad sketching. Behold! The Mystery Squad!


	8. Day 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So **content warning** for the sex at the end of this chapter which... IDK. It's not dubcon but it's not like super happy funcon, either.
> 
> Also horrible pterodactyl screeches at new show eps I haven't seen.

It takes nearly a whole day to realize his sister’s been shot.

“What happened to your arm?”

They’re in the kitchen, looking for something approaching breakfast in the remains of Grunkle Stan’s hoard of canned meats and powdered eggs.

“Gideon happened,” Mabel says. She’d been reaching overhead when she’d gasped in pain and pulled the arm back. That’s when Dipper had noticed the bandage.

She lets him inspect it; just a big white mass wrapped around her right bicep. A little smear of red-brown blood mars the otherwise pristine surface. Honestly, Dipper’s surprised it hasn’t been Bedazzled yet.

“Is this… did he  _shoot_  you?” He hears the echo of it in his head, the gunshot he was too busy wrestling Bill to pay much mind to.

“Only a little bit,” Mabel protests, pulling her arm back. “Don’t be weird about it.”

“He shot you!” Dipper is definitely going to be weird about it. He decides being weird about it is his right. “Why didn’t you mention something yesterday?”

Mabel just rolls her eyes. “Because,” she says. “You were too busy beating the angles out of Bill to notice. And by the time we got back from the hospital, you’d fallen asleep and were drooling all over your notebooks.” A pause, then, “Bill’s doing better, thanks for asking. You broke the bone in his eye socket. He’s lucky he doesn’t have an eye there, because if he did, he wouldn’t anymore.”

Dipper’s expression goes from sympathy to anger fast enough to make a car commercial jealous. “I don’t care about Bill,” he says.

“So you say.”

“Where is he, anyway?”

“Oh, this is you not caring, is it?” Then, before Dipper can counter that of course he wants to know where Bill is, because  _Bill’s dangerous Mabel he murdered Grunkle Stan_ , Mabel adds, “I think he’s sulking behind the Sascrotch. You know. If you decide you ‘don’t care’ enough to go apologize.”

Dipper, whose own jaw is an aching mass of bruises, and whose knuckles are swollen enough to make holding painful, just glares. Let Bill sulk all he likes behind the rest of the Shack’s manufactured freakshows. Dipper will erect a little plaque and start charging admission.

“Urgh. I don’t believe you sometimes.” Mabel throws her hands up like she’s done with it. “Let’s just eat.”

They end up making waffles, using a box of powder that expired back when Dipper was in high school. The result is edible, when buried under half a bottle of syrup, but reminds them they need to go buy groceries.

“What’ve you been eating for the last week, anyway?”

Dipper doesn’t answer, just saws at his waffles hard enough that the knife makes an awful screech against the plate. He doesn’t want to think about dinners with the Northwest-Gleefuls or, worse, with Bill. Doesn’t want to think about the Dipper of last week and a lifetime ago, dumb and happy and duped.

Mabel puts her own plate down on the table, then picks up a third and begins to walk out of the kitchen.

“Where are you going?”

“Bill needs to eat too, Dipper.”

“He won’t eat waffles.” The words come out before he can stop them. He scowls hard enough that his head aches, shoving food into his mouth before he can say anything else.

Bill, as it turns out, does eat waffles, or at least picks at half of one.

“He doesn’t like processed food,” Dipper grudgingly admits when they’re cleaning up afterwards. “Or animal products. He says eating ‘other meatsacks’ is disgusting.”

“Like a raw food vegan?” Mabel, arts school student.

Dipper shrugs. Fad diets in the EECS mostly involve food pill startups and protein shakes.

They leave Bill at the Shack when they go into town. Dipper doesn’t like it, but Mabel tells him not to be an idiot. “Where else is he going to go, Dipper?”

“I dunno. Back to Gideon?” The thought of the two of them, conspiring in the dark, sends chills up Dipper’s spine.

“Oh, dear brother mine,” Mabel says, “this may have escaped your self-pitying attention, but Bill  _hates_  Gideon. He always has, even back when we were kids. Besides, even if he didn’t. You have this.” She flicks at the bell still strung around Dipper’s neck.

“So?”

Mabel just rolls her eyes. “You really need to talk to Bill,” she says. “Or apologize until he’ll talk to you.”

“Why?”

“I can’t tell you,” Mabel says. “That would be breaking a confidence.”

“What? Mabel!”

“We spent a long time at the hospital yesterday,” Mabel says. “And yes, we talked. A lot. About you. You broke his heart, you know that?”

Dipper can’t believe what he’s hearing. “ _I_  broke  _his_  heart? Mabel, he’s been erasing my memories!”

Mabel looks like she’s about to say something, then reconsiders, running her fingers across her lips like she’s fastening a zip.

“He’s a demon,” Dipper tries. “It’s not like he even has a heart.”

But Mabel just shakes her head. “Uh-uh,” she says. “Not from me.”

Dipper wonders if it’s wrong to wish for Gideon’s goons to leap from behind the trees to attack them. At least that would be an enemy he could fight.

* * *

Dipper’s car won’t start thanks to the EMP, so they take Stan’s. The thing is older than Dipper is, and almost certainly not roadworthy. But it’s pure mechanics, no computers involved, and so it works in the way his own vehicle doesn’t.

Buying groceries turns into the most heart-pounding half an hour of Dipper’s life. He keeps waiting for something, anything, to happen. For someone to leap from behind the soup display with a gun. To round an aisle and see Gideon’s grinning, piggish face. Dipper’s never been one for guns, but he’s starting to wish otherwise. He does wish he’d at least thought to bring something of Ford’s; the glove or the freeze ray or  _something_  that would mean they weren’t helpless. That would mean he wasn’t helpless. He keeps thinking about the wound on Mabel’s arm. Three stitches and a bandage, but it could very easily have been worse. Through a lung or through the heart. And maybe Bill is right about that, if nothing else. That they really are nothing but fragile little sacks of meat, one wrong step from a fall into the void.

At the thought of Bill, Dipper has a flash of cold tiles and the musty smell of old man.

The intrusion is so sharp and clear it stops him in his tracks, right there in the middle of the aisle. The bell feels warm against his skin, warm and powerful enough to set Dipper’s hair on end.

He reaches for it, pulling it out of his shirt, holding it skin-to-metal in his hand. Then he thinks,  _Bill._

Suddenly, he’s back in the Shack. In the bathroom, in fact, and he can feel the cold tiles beneath his bare feet and the cold basin edge against his hands. He’s leaning forward, looking at his— No, no it’s not his reflection. It’s Bill. He’s seeing through Bill’s eye, feeling with Bill’s skin, and—

“I see you’ve figured out how it works.”

Bill is talking. To his reflection in the mirror, except he’s actually talking to Dipper.

“Yes, I know when you’re there.” Bill’s face is a patchwork of purple-black. The eyebrow above his empty socket is half-shaved, the hair replaced by a row of little stitches. Another row runs along the bottom, just above his cheek. He has a split lip and his nose is a mess and his eye is barely open. He’s not wearing a shirt, so Dipper can see more bruises down his chest and, if he concentrates, he can feel the edge of an ache from every breath.

“I need to piss,” Bill announces. “Watch if you must.”

Dipper opens his eyes and drops the bell. When he does so, he sees Mabel, standing in front of him with an armful of vegetables. “I owe Bill twenty bucks,” is all she says.

* * *

They get back to the Shack without incident, and Dipper helps Mabel restock the kitchen. They spend the rest of the morning going through the ransacked basement, trying to figure out what, if anything, Gideon’s goons could’ve taken. Ford was meticulous, as far as notes and inventory went, but he was also paranoid, and kind of crazy, and sometimes not even Dipper can work through the layers of ciphers and obfuscations.

It’s tedious work, and dangerous, and Dipper hopes the scurrying he can hear behind the walls is from the rats, not from anything that may or may not have escaped from the shattered Containment Tank #67. He shudders to think what would’ve happened if the fire had been allowed to spread. 

By mid afternoon the basement is slightly cleaner, but they’re no closer to working out what was taken. They are both hungry, however, and head upstairs to raid the newly stocked fridge.

Dipper’s putting the finishing touches on a cheese and Dorito sandwich when Bill walks in. He’s grinning a shark toothed grin, his eye gleaming manic underneath the bruising, and he’s holding something long and black Dipper mistakes at first for his cane.

“Been wanting to do this for  _years_ ,” Bill says. He grabs Mabel’s arm as he walks past. “You too.”

Dipper’s halfway through a shout, his hand halfway to the bell, when he realizes the thing Bill’s holding is not, in fact, his cane. It’s a crowbar. Long and heavy and black and inscribed with sigils, and Dipper knows this because Bill is swinging it right at Dipper’s head.

He ducks.

At first he thinks he’s too late. Bill can be fast when he needs to be, and Dipper slams his eyes shut, waiting for pain and darkness. He gets the latter but not the former, instead gets the sound of his sister’s panicked yelp and the crash of wood and Bill’s insane laughter, all straight lines and edges, in his ears.

When he opens his eyes, the world is gray and silver.

Gray and silver except for Bill, who is pulsing gold and brighter than the sun. He’s still holding he crowbar and he’s pulling it back for a second go. Dipper lunges sideways and the bar connects with wood a second time, sending silvery splinters flashing across the Mindscape. Dipper is on the ground and has no time to react, just kicks out with a sneaker that connects heavy against Bill’s… vertex? Bricks? Dipper has no idea how to describe Bill’s anatomy in this place, particularly given what he sees with his eyes in no way matches what he thinks he feels beneath his shoe.

Either way, it has the desired effect, sending Bill tumbling backwards in the air and the crowbar clattering to the floor. “Oh, real nice, Pine Tree,” Bill snaps. “Kick the blind guy. What a hero.” It occurs to Dipper, as Bill says this, that he might not be lying. His eye isn’t just closed, it’s _crossed out_ ; two big diagonal slashes covering the lid. “Don’t say I didn’t try.” And then Bill’s gone, floating up the stairs, arms out to steady himself against the ceiling.

Dipper’s about to chase him, is halfway through screaming, “Get out of my head!”, when a hand grabs his wrist.

“Dipper, look.” The hand is Mabel’s, and Dipper startles a little to realize she’s here, too. She’s also looking at something behind him.

Dipper turns.

There’s a door. The words TRUST NO ONE are written above it, and there are boards nailed across the jamb. Or boards that had been nailed, until Bill smashed them. Beyond the boards, the door has been pushed ajar, and through the gap Dipper can see himself, just woken up and bathed in a cold blue glow, walking into the den.

And then it occurs to him he isn’t  _seeing_  the scene at all. He’s remembering it. “This… I remember this,” he says. “It was just before you arrived. I woke up, and I heard a noise downstairs and…” And he doesn’t remember what he found. Not yet. But he will.

He goes to grab the discarded crowbar, levering the remaining boards from the doorframe. After a moment, Mabel moves to help, brandishing her own conjured tool in glittering pink and fluorescent green. Together, they make short work of the boards, and then Dipper is standing in front of the open door, remembering the scene inside, his sister’s hand warm and soft against his. Dipper is suddenly very grateful he remembered to put on clothes before walking down those stairs.

“He was talking to Gideon,” he says. “We…” He doesn’t know how to tell his sister the rest of the story. Doesn’t know how to tell her how happy he’d been, how sweet Bill had acted when they’d woken up. As soft and as gentle as Dipper supposes a guy made entirely of angles, literally, ever could be. They’d kissed and made love, and Dipper still feels stupid using that term for it, even if it’s written in big giant letters above the door across the hall. Because that’s what it’d been, black-ink fingers caressing his neck and his sides, soft lips hiding sharp teeth as they mapped symbols across his skin that, in retrospect, Dipper can’t help but decipher as goodbye.

He doesn’t know how to tell this to his sister, because she’s his sister. Because she’s his sister, he doesn’t have to.

“Oh, Dipper,” she says. 

He looks at the scene through the door, rewound and replaying, and he looks at the crowbar. He thinks of a hill overlooking the town, thinks of Bill asking what he’d choose, if the choice was his was to make. He thinks of knowledge and power and consequences, of the crunch of bone against bone and the easy red-white rage of thoughtless violence.

Mostly, he thinks there’s something he’s still missing.

“I guess,” he finally says, “I have some doors to open.”

* * *

By the time he gets to the attic, he remembers everything. Or could remember, if he tried. It’s too much too quickly for him to process, and his arms ache and his back is sore and his hands have so many splinters the crowbar feels like it’s made of glass.

He doesn’t drop it. Is still carrying it when he reaches the final stair, steps out onto boards flushed golden from the light of a window-that-isn’t. Dipper knows this sight, now. Knows he’s seen it before, Bill floating calm against the attic seat. It’s not quite the same as Dipper’s memory; Bill’s eye is still crossed out and no flames wreath his hands. Then again, Dipper isn’t the kid he used to be, either. He supposes everyone grows up eventually, even demons.

“It’s a metaphor,” Bill says. “And not a very subtle one. You were a kid the first time ‘round, so had to see it all from a kid’s point of view. That affects things. Makes them hard to change. Human minds are so… fixed. I never used to understand why. I wish I still didn’t.”

“Bill…” Behind him, Dipper feels Mabel’s hand between his shoulder blades. Comfort and encouragement rolled into a single touch.

“He wanted me to burn them out,” Bill continues. Dipper doesn’t have to ask who’s meant by “he”. “I said if I did that, you’d end up like McGucket. That your sister would be suspicious.”

“Is that true?”

Dipper’s not sure how an abstract representation of the omniscience of the divine can shrug, but Bill manages. “Who cares, sucker bought it. So we did this, instead.” A pause, then: “And now, judging from all the banging, you’ve undone it.”

Dipper frowns. “Can’t you tell?”

“Remember what I was saying about unsubtle metaphors? This is another one.” He gestures to his crossed off eye. “I’m human, remember? Or close enough. The rest is just dress-ups. Mealy-mouthed nostalgia.”

Dipper’s hand goes to the bell, still hanging around his neck. “But you brought us here.”

“By hitting you in the head with a magic stick,” Bill says. “Even you could’ve pulled that one off.”

Dipper thinks he understands. “You’ve lost your innate magic,” he says. Hadn’t Gideon said something to that effect on the video? “Your connection to the Mindscape.”

“Not lost,” Bill corrects. “I know exactly where it is, and I know exactly how to get back to it.”

“Gideon has it,” Dipper says. He’s guessing out loud but he’s pretty sure he’s right. Bill’s certainly dropped enough clues. “It’s the part of you he has bound somewhere. You return to it if your body dies, but then you’re trapped wherever that is. And without the bell to control you, he won’t be growing you a new clone in a hurry.”

“Now does the plot make sense?”

Before Dipper can answer, Mabel asks: “But why does he want it? It can’t really be just about protecting the town.”

“Why not?”

Mabel gapes like she can’t believe what she’s hearing. “Because it’s  _Gideon_. Of course it’s not about protecting anything but himself.”

But Dipper isn’t so sure. “Maybe… maybe it’s more complicated than that,” he says.

“Dipper!” Mabel turns to him. “He killed Grunkle Stan!”

Dipper’s eyes flick to Bill, but the guy has one hell of a poker face when he isn’t moving. “I know,” Dipper says. “And I’ll hate him for it, always. But… he was trying to get the Shack. We know this place is dangerous, Mabel, and… and our family haven’t always been the best custodians.”

“Dipper! I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Grunkle Stan is dead.  _Dead_.”

Funny, Dipper thinks, how quickly she could forgive Bill the same thing. “I’m not saying what Gideon’s done is right—”

“You’d better not be!”

“—I’m just saying I can see…” Mabel is giving him such a look that Dipper stops, reconsiders, and finishes with: “I’m just saying I’m not convinced the guy needs some sinister ulterior motive for trapping a dangerous demon.” He thinks for a moment, then, to Bill: “No offense.”

Bill just sighs. “So close, Pine Tree,” he says. Then he snaps his fingers and—

* * *

—is swinging the crowbar, right at Dipper’s head.

Dipper ducks, but too late. The crowbar hits him, dead across the forehead, with a sound like a handful of glitter thrown against a wall. Dipper hits the kitchen floor amidst a shower of fine black dust. The stuff is awful, gets in his eyes and mouth and nose, and he coughs and coughs and coughs. His forehead smarts from the impact, from the magic discharged into his mind even as the physical object disintegrated. Deeper than that, his head feels like someone’s been doing renovations, pulling boards and opening doors, a hundred re-rembered memories roaming free around the halls.

Mabel helps him up. “How’re you feeling?” she asks.

Dipper doesn’t know, so says nothing. Across the kitchen, Bill watches carefully through one swollen eye. They look at each other for one long, heart-wrenching moment. Then Bill snorts, and walks out of the room.

Dipper’s sandwich is still sitting on the kitchen counter. Suddenly, he isn’t hungry.

* * *

“I… I think we need to talk.”

Mabel wasn’t kidding about Bill hiding behind the Sascrotch. He’s practically got a little nest, blankets and pillows in the dark, and a plate of half-eaten carrot sticks Dipper saw his sister cutting up at lunchtime. The sight of them makes his heart ache. Three straight lines and a circle, and Dipper’s feet won’t touch the ground. He’s screaming and Stan is screaming, and Mabel and a decision are the only things standing between them and the end of the world.

Dipper remembers watching Mabel floating into the light, tears a glittering halo around her head. She’d had a choice, that day, and for a long time Dipper had believed it’d been between him and Stan. But now he’s older, an adult looking back on that moment with an adult’s eyes. And now, what he thinks, is that Mabel’s true choice had been between thinking the best of someone and thinking the worst.

Dipper had feared what Stan could’ve been. Mabel had believed in what he was.

And now she believes in Bill. Enough to bring him blankets and make him lunch, to care for him the a way Dipper isn’t. Dipper, who not two days ago had called Bill boyfriend and thought he might just be in love.

“Can I sit down?”

Bill makes a gesture, a sort of  _do what you like, it’s your house_ , and Dipper figures it’s as much as an invitation as he’s going to get. So he sits, on the floor, back against the wall. Bill has his blind-side to the Sascrotch, so for once Dipper is sitting on the side with his eye. Less bruising on this side, too. Dipper’s not sure what he thinks about that.

He really, really wants to reach out and take Bill’s hand. He’s pretty sure he shouldn’t. Instead, they sit there in awkward, awful silence. 

Finally, Dipper says: “I… How’s your face?”

“Painful.”

“Oh. Um. I’m sorry.”

A shrug. “It’s pain.”

He’s not quite sure how to take that. He’s looking at Bill but Bill’s looking at the far wall, and Dipper reaches out, as if to stroke Bill’s cheek. He gets halfway through the gesture before stopping, dropping his hand with a sigh. 

“Bill,” he says. “Please, ta—”

He doesn’t get any further. Because suddenly Bill’s fingers are on his face, squeezing his bruised jaw hard enough to bring tears to his eyes. Bill’s own eye is very close, boring into Dipper with manic intensity.

“I don’t want to talk,” he hisses, voice low and staticky in the dark. “I want to fuck. If you’re not up for it, get out.”

“I—”

But Bill’s not kidding when he says he doesn’t want to talk. Instead, he’s crushing his mouth against Dipper’s, more of a sharp-toothed bite than a kiss. Dipper hesitates for a moment, then returns it. Bill doesn’t want to talk? Fine. They can do this instead.

He brings his hand up, grabbing a handful of hair, not gently and earns a groan for his efforts. Bill likes pain? Also fine. They can do that, too, and Dipper presses his thumb against the top of Bill’s cheek, feeling the broken eye socket give beneath the stitches.

Bill groans so loud Dipper has a moment of panic about his sister. It’s late, and she’s in bed, but if she decides to come see what’s going on…

“We should…” Dipper manages, breath hitching as Bill’s teeth find his earlobe. “Upstairs.”

Bill growls, a frustrated sound, but then he’s standing, stalking off as fast as he can on his injured leg. Which is… pretty fast, as it turns out. Dipper scurrying after him, wondering if he should offer some kind of assistance up the stairs, deciding against it, then watching Bill practically haul himself up by the railing. He’s pretty good at it, but Dipper still feels… Honestly, he’s not sure how he feels right now. He decides not to think about it.

A minute later, his mind even starts cooperating. Particularly when black fingers are tearing his shirt over and off, unbuckling his jeans, pushing him down onto the bed. Dipper falls backwards hard enough to hit his head against the headboard, but Bill doesn’t stop, just kneels to straddle Dipper’s hips, pulling off his own shirt, exposing the mass of purple and black, fading yellow-green around the edges.

Dipper reaches up, tries to gently stroke the damage. To wipe the injuries away, to erase the version of him that made them. But Bill isn’t having any of it. Instead grabs Dipper’s hand, pressing it into the center of the largest patch of purple, throwing back his head and laughing at the feel.

“Fuck,” he says. “Yes.” So Dipper keeps pushing. On that spot, and others, until Bill falls forward, propped up on shaking arms, breath a heavy, wheezing rattle.

He’s rock hard, too. Dipper rubs the length through black wool, feeling Bill’s hips buck. Press a bruise, press a cock, And if Dipper keeps it up, he’s pretty sure Bill’s going to come right there. Right in his pants, the only pair is has, and then what’s he going to do? Walk around the house naked, or in Dipper’s clothes?

Dipper would be lying to say he didn’t like the idea. Either of them. But.

But he makes a decision, lurching up and flipping them before Bill has a chance to resist. Then Dipper’s on top, and it’s his turn to fumble with buttons and zippers, to slide ink black wool down ink black flesh and… oh yeah. Yeah, it’s only been days and already he’s missed this. Missed the long, easy spread of limbs, missed the way Bill’s back arches as Dipper bites up the inside of his thigh. Missed the weigh of him, the heat, the scent. Missed the way the brickwork tattoo cups the firm round globes of his ass. Missed the way Bill’s knees go so easy up around his ears, folded in half under Dipper’s weight. Bill’s laughing, the unhinged sound he makes when he’s in pain, and this position must hurt him, must crush his injured ribs, and he loves every minute of it, cock bobbing and hard and leaking against a belly that shudders with each gasped breath.

“You wanted to be fucked?” Dipper says, biting at Bill’s bruised cheek. “Then you’ll get fucked.”

There’s lube in the nightstand, leftover from the other day, rescued from Dipper’s duffle bag in the wake of some other adventure months ago. Bill is a much better lay than the guy from that trip, but then Dipper supposes everyone’s going to be terrible compared to the rush from having a demon pant and whine his name.

He’s not slow or gentle with the prep, all quick and messy fingers, one and two and three much too fast but that’s fine, Bill loves that, too. And Dipper has to laugh at the irony; a pain in the ass for a pain in the ass. It’s not a nice laugh, but this isn’t a nice night, and he can live with it.

When he slams in, Bill’s whole body spasms. Clenches. Tears leaking out the corner of his eye. Dipper licks them away, then bites down on Bill’s earlobe, pushing himself in and out of tight, wet heat. It’s good, so good, and if he closes his eyes he can almost imagine it’s still the other day, that Bill’s skin in smooth and unmarked and Dipper’s world is calm and untroubled.

When he feels Bill reach down to stroke himself, Dipper slaps the hand away. Slaps it away and presses a thumb back against the broken socket. “Just how much  _do_  you like pain?” he growls, and Bill just laughs and laughs and laughs. “You’re so fucked up,” Dipper says, grinding his thumb, leaning in for a kiss that’s more teeth than tongue.

Against his mouth, Bill says, “I’m a demon. What’s your excuse?” And then he’s coming, hot sticky rope spurting across their chests, body clenching and contracting in a way that has Dipper’s own void-blank oblivion rushing up to meet him. He lets it, falling back into the dark, ropes of ecstasy long black coils that lash in his burning wake.

* * *

Afterwards, Bill pushes him off, not gently. Then he stands, wiping himself off on Dipper’s shirt, pulling on his own clothes without a word.

“Bill…” Dipper levers himself up onto one elbow. Bill is still unfathomably beautiful in the dark, skin glowing golden from the moonlight, filtered through yellow stained glass. “You don’t… Stay? Please?”

Bill turns, just enough to regard Dipper with one cold blue eye. He says, “Is that an order, Master?” and the bottom drops out of Dipper’s world.

“W-what?”

Bill raises his eyebrow, his eye flicking down to Dipper’s chest and then back again. “You have the bell,” he says. “You’ve show you’ve no problem with using it.” A glance at the notebooks, sprawled out across the desk. “You’ve shown you plan on finding a more permanent solution. It’s difficult for me to resist a command spoken in the presence of my true name. I’m tired, and I’d rather spare myself the effort. So, I ask again. Is that an order,  _Master_?” Such stress on that last word, such bitterness and bile.

Dipper’s frozen, mouth hanging open, heart barely beating, breath barely coming. Bill watches him for a moment, the he snorts. An angry, dismissive sound. “Fine,” he says. Then he gathers up his clothes, and is gone.

Dipper waits until he can no longer hear Bill’s uneven gait on the Shack’s wooden floor.

Then he races to the toilet, slams the door, and throws up into the bowl.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Er... I feel like we've messed up the music at some point. [Oh well](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TffpkE2GU4).


	9. Day 11

That night, he doesn’t sleep. Just lies awake on the floor in his room, staring at the leering grin of a moon through the awful golden window. It’s cold down here, and hard, but it’s still better than the bed. Better than its tangle of sheets that smell like Bill and sex and every messed-up decision Dipper’s ever made in a life of messed-up decisions which, incidentally, he now remembers. Particularly at 4am as the moon is setting and his eyes burn and his mind is a racing mess of straight lines and angles, circles and connections. He knows there’s something he’s missing, some little piece that will make this all fall into place, will make the world make sense again. Will make his sister smile and Bill twine long black fingers through his hair. Some alternate universe where Gideon isn’t a monster and Stan isn’t dead and Dipper Pines is just Dipper Pines, cryptography student, enjoying the mountain air before his real life resumes.

He doesn’t mean for his hand to reach for the bell. He really doesn’t. Doesn’t mean to wonder whether Bill’s asleep, and whether Dipper could think his name and step into his dreams, in the way Bill always steps into his. He wonders what a demon’s Mindscape even looks like. Unfathomable horrors from beneath the veil? Or does Bill dream normal person dreams, of showing up to work naked or not being able to find a bathroom at the mall? Dipper wants to know. He wants to know if he  _can_  know, and the bell’s brass crackles under his fingers, warm and welcoming and—

And all Dipper can think of is Bill’s expression when he walked out; hurt and tired and angry. And Dipper’s seen that expression before, he knows it very well. Because, he realizes, it’s the expression Bill gets whenever he thinks of Gideon.

His hand drops. Away from the bell and back to the floorboards. He should destroy it, he knows that. No knowledge without power, Bill had said, and no power with exploitation and this, Dipper realizes, was what he meant.

He should destroy the bell. Destroy the bell and free Bill, and then what? Dipper remembers the flare of cold blue against his palm, the horror of standing outside his own body. Human or demon, Bill is dangerous. All the power of a mortal man, Gideon had said, and it might’ve been comfort but it seems like a threat. Dipper has known his fair share of dangerous mortal men.

He needs to decode the cipher. The bell cipher for Bill Cipher, the one truth in six thousand lies. Dipper can do it, he knows he can. Another day’s worth of work, maybe less. Then it’ll be done, and he can destroy the bell. Can free Bill, can keep the True Name of the Eye of Providence locked away behind one of those doors, locked and bolted, that he can pay he’ll never have to open.

Dipper can do all that, and Bill will never even have to know. And then everything will be fine.

* * *

The sun is well and truly up by the time he stumbles from his room. His eyes ache and his head is racing, and he needs to pee and find something to eat.

Mabel is downstairs, reviewing papers in the kitchen. When Dipper emerges, she gives him a bright, leering grin and says, “So-oo-oo. How’s Bi-ii-ii-ii-ill?”

He blinks at her, mind slowly switching gears from frequencies and substitutions. “Huh?”

“Bill,” Mabel repeats, slow and patient. “How is he this morning?”

Dipper scowls, turning to the fridge. “No idea. Ask him.”

Behind him, he hears an outraged gasp. “Dipper Pines!” his sister snaps. “Don’t you ‘no idea, ask him’ me, young man! I did  _not_  unpack my noise canceling headphones last night for ‘no idea, ask him’!”

Dipper winces, despite how wonderful the cold fridge air feels against his burning forehead. “Mabel. I’m not in the mood.”

“Well good,” is the only response. “Because neither am I, mister. I thought you were going to talk to him?”

Dipper grabs milk, because cereal will do, and slams the fridge door as he turns. “He said he didn’t want to talk. So we fucked instead, and then he left.” The edited version, but it’s his sister. Even underneath the anger he still feels weird saying the word “fucked” in front of her.

“He said he didn’t want to talk?”

“Yeah.” Bowl from one cupboard, some bright packet of something sugary from another.

“Dipper, you know there’s no such thing as ‘don’t want to talk’, right? It’s just what people say when they mean ‘I don’t think you’ll listen’.”

Dipper’s frosted chemical flakes are just as obnoxious as he’d imagined, and that’s perfect. Just a perfect reflection on his entire life, really.

Mabel watches him for a while, then shakes her head. “You’re hopeless,” she says. “Utterly hopeless.”

Dipper just takes his cereal upstairs, and eats it in his room.

* * *

Later, stepping out of the shower:

“—s it like?” His sister’s voice, muffled through the thin walls of the Shack.

“Think of being in a box.” Bill’s voice. “Small and dark. You can’t stand, can’t sit, can’t stretch. Curled over and cramped. The walls are black, you’re the only thing inside. There’s no air, just what you have around you. Slowly, very slowly, you feel that air going stale. Recycled through your own mouth a thousand times, each breath becoming less and less. Your lungs burn, you start to panic. You’re going to die, slowly suffocating in this place you can’t escape, can’t even get enough space to pound the walls, can’t get enough air to scream for help. And you notice a tiny hole. Light comes through the hole but, more importantly, so does air. If you stretch, contort your body in the awful space, you can just get your mouth in front of it. Can suck in the fresh taste of the outside, of the place you use to know and have started to think you’ll never return to. That hole is tiny, barely a pinprick. But in this place? It’s everything. It’s life.” A pause, then: “When the bell rings, it’s like someone covers that hole.”

Dipper flushes the toilet, and any further words banish beneath the sound.

* * *

He’s back in his room when the car pulls up. A purple Jaguar, roaring into the drive, and Dipper is downstairs even before the pounding starts on the door. Mabel is there before he is, and they share a look. Even Bill has emerged, holding a question-mark topped cane like a weapon.

When they open the door, it’s Pacifica. Her hair is a mess and she’s not wearing makeup, and Dipper doesn’t think he’s ever seen her so disheveled.

“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice thin and hitching behind tears. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

Dipper looks to Mabel but Mabel is looking to Bill. He nods, briefly and just once, then vanishes back into the house. Mabel, meanwhile, rushes forward, collecting Pacifica into her arms, pulling her into the den. She makes soothing sounds, asks soothing questions. Pacifica lasts exactly seven seconds before she breaks, crumpling into big, ugly sobs against Mabel’s shoulder.

Dipper goes to get some tissues. And some water. And by the time he’s collected that, Pacifica has calmed down. At least a little. Is holding onto Mabel like she never intends to let go, saying, “I don’t know what’s changed. He’s just so  _different_ ” over and over.

When Bill reemerges, it’s with an armful of things from the basement, most of which he dumps on the floor. He throws one device to Dipper, a long black wand that looks sort of like a hand-held version of the EMP. “Check her,” he says. “Probably the jewelry.”

He’s not lying; when Dipper passes the wand over Pacifica’s wedding ring, it goes berserk. Pacifica’s eyes go very round. “What…”

“Pacifica,” Mabel says, slow and gentle. “You’re going to need to give Dipper your ring.”

“I… why?”

“Please,” Dipper says. “Just trust us.”

Pacifica looks at him, and she looks at Mabel, but mostly she looks at Bill.

“They’ll help,” he says.

Pacifica sniffs. Even covered in snot and tears she’s beautiful. Dipper has no idea what’s going on, but can make a pretty good guess. And when they’re through here? Oh, when they’re through, Gideon is a dead man.

“G-giddy,” Pacifica starts, “Giddy says you…”

“Long story,” Bill says. “Be easier if we show you. But first, Pine Tree needs your ring.”

Dipper tries not to examine too much the little slash of hope the nickname gives him, and instead gives Pacifica his best sympathetic smile. She watches him for a moment, a hurt falcon, reluctant to trust. And then she removes the ring, and puts it in his palm.

“On the table. Red button,” Bill says.

Dipper follows the instructions. On the table, under the pulse of the wand, the ring twitches, then pops, then sparks. Then a small curl of acrid smoke emerges from the band.

“What—?” Pacifica starts, but Mabel shushes her.

This time, when Dipper sweeps the wand over her, it comes up clean.

“Gideon bugs  _everything_ ,” Mabel says. Then, “I’m sorry.”

Pacifica’s hand is over her mouth. “Oh god,” she says. “Oh god. I knew… He could be…” She stops, swallows. “He gets angry,” she says, voice small. “But the last few days… It’s like he’s a different person.” Then: “Was… was he  _watching_  me? All the time?”

“I’m sorry,” Mabel says again.

“Oi, Pines. Make yourself useful,” is all Dipper hears before a book is flying at his head. He catches it, just. It’s one of Ford’s journals, not from the sequence Dipper remembers as a child. “Marked page,” Bill says.

Dipper is somewhat unsurprised to see a depiction of Bill beneath the bookmark, although the symbol wheel is different than he remembers. Ford’s cipher is the same, and Dipper gets halfway through reading before he realizes what he’s looking at.

“This is what you used on me,” he says. A ritual to enchant an object, to create a key to open a passage into an individual’s Mindscape. The picture of Bill is a warning: ROADS IT HAS CUT CANNOT BE FULLY HEALED. ONCE INVITED, EVEN THE STRONGEST WARDS CANNOT KEEP IT OUT. MY SEARCH CONTINUES.

“Here.” Another object, tossed his way. This one a cheap plastic tiara, the letters HAPPY NEW 2014!!! settled between mis-cast silver filigree.

“Gideon did to Pacifica what he did to me.”

“Don’t think yourself special.” Bill is drawing something on the floor. A large circle, surrounded by signs and sigils. “Most of the town got the same.”

“Why?”

“Control,” Mabel says. “If he can make people forget the bad things, then it doesn’t matter how he acts. Any reaction he doesn’t like, he can erase.”

“Gold star for the star,” Bill says, not looking up from his work.

“Mabel,” from Pacifica. “Mabel, what— what’s going on? What…” But all Mabel can do is apologize. For leaving, maybe. For getting out where Pacifica couldn’t.

Dipper helps Bill with the ritual; prepping the circle, laying the tiara at the center, then reciting the chat.

“Your pronunciation makes my ears bleed,” Bill snaps, when Dipper fumbles the words.

“Well then you do it.”

“Not a good idea,” Bill says. “This is human magic. It’s… unpredictable when I try.”

“You did it to me!”

“That was different,” Bill snaps, looking away. “I— I had more time.” His brow is furrowed, his lips thin and pale and sheened with sweat, teeth pressed against the flesh as if he’s biting back words.

It occurs to Dipper the bell around his neck is very warm, that the power prickling across his skin isn’t just from the circle.

“Bill,” he says. “I… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…” Then, clearer. “I didn’t mean it. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

“Cute,” Bill says. “But life doesn’t work like that.” Even still, Dipper sees the tension unwind from his shoulders.

He finishes the chant. The circle glows, flaring cold blue and mellow gold, cumulating in a flash as the power transfers into the tiara. Pacifica gasps, “It’s magic!” As if she’s never seen exactly that, and it occurs to Dipper that maybe she hasn’t. Maybe Gideon took that from her in the same way he took it from Dipper, took it from anyone who wasn’t Gideon. Anyone who could possibly know what he was doing or think of how to stop it.

When its done, the tiara glitters. A true gem, despite the text and the plastic feel in Dipper’s hands. He takes it Pacifica, holds it out.

“Put it on,” Mabel says, “and everything will change. You… you won’t be able to go back. And things… you might learn things that hurt. But we’ll be there, if you want us to be.”

Pacifica nods, her expression setting into something hard behind the snot and the tears. Something Dipper remembers from a decade ago. “I do,” she says. “I’m ready.” She takes the tiara.

Mabel still has an arm around Pacifica, and she holds out her free hand. Dipper takes it, then feels Bill’s own hand descend on his shoulder.

“Do it,” Bill says.

Pacifica does, lowering the tiara with all the authority of a queen, eyes closed and lips set even as the color bleeds from the world. The Shack walls shoot outwards, reaching higher, old wood warping to gold and mahogany, crystal chandeliers and marble parapets. And then they’re standing in a ballroom, as huge and grand as any in Northwest Manor.

Pacifica opens her eyes, then sucks in a breath. “Where—?”

“Think of it as a metaphor for the inside of your own mind,” Bill says. Then adds: “It isn’t. But it’s close enough.” His hand lifts from Dipper’s shoulder. Dipper tries not to notice the loss.

“Well,” Pacifica says, trying a small smile. “At least I have good taste.” She stands, the Shack’s ratty old couch replaced by a velvet chaise longue. She looks down at herself. “Even if I feel under-dressed.”

“It’s your mind,” Bill says. “Imagine whatever you want.”

Pacifica does, closing her eyes and lifting her arms. She drops them with a twirl, sparkles exploding outwards as her clothes transform into a ball gown that floats like a cloud and glimmers orange and purple like the dying light of evening. Even her hair and makeup is fixed, and when she looks down at herself, she smiles. “Awesome.”

Then Mabel is shouting, “Makeover!” And there’s another shower of glitter as she too transforms, ending up in a riot of neons that look like a collision between Marie Antoinette and 1985.

The women both laugh, holding hands, spinning each other around in a moment of such uncomplicated joy that Dipper can forget where they are and why. At least until their eyes turn to him.

“Your turn!” Mabel announces. 

Dipper holds up his hands in warding, stumbling backwards. “Oh, no,” he says. “I’m fine, thanks.”

“Nonsense,” says Pacifica, looking thoughtful. “I think orange perhaps?”

“No orange,” Mabel says. “It’ll clash with Bill’s yellow.” Which earns her a thoughtful nod but, more importantly:

“Bill! Bill, hel—” Dipper cuts himself off before he can issue the command. Besides, Bill is already adjusting his top hat, diamond-topped cane catching the Mindscape’s silver light. He looks amazing, which in Dipper’s opinion is entirely unfair. No one should be able to pull off that outfit. He should look like a bumblebee’s butler, not like… Not like…

Dipper is very aware that he’s staring, Pacifica and Mabel giggling as they whisper behind silk-gloved hands. Bill’s brow quirks at Dipper’s attention, his snapped, “What?” doing nothing to still the fluttering in Dipper’s chest or the hot roil in his belly.

Bill looks amazing in his outfit. Dipper is pretty sure he’d look even better out of it.

All his voice manages to squeak out is, “Why do you still look human?”

“This is my realm,” Bill says, inspecting one flared black glove. “I can look like whatever I want.”

It occurs to Dipper that he’d always thought Bill looked like Bill because that’s what he looked like. He’d never considered someone would choose to manifest as a floating golden triangle. He wonders what it means that, right now, Bill isn’t. Maybe nothing. Maybe he’s just doing it for Pacifica’s sake, and maybe while Dipper agonizes over this his sister leaps up behind him and announces, “Dippicus Sartorificus!”

Then there’s another explosion of glitter, and when Dipper’s done coughing, he looks down to find himself in a relatively staid black velvet tailcoat, accented in flame-bright blue.

“There,” Mabel announces. “Now you look appropriate.”

* * *

Things get somber pretty quickly after that. Pacifica is armored behind elegance but her hand still clutches Mabel as they leave the ballroom and enter the gallery wing. This is Pacifica’s equivalent to Dipper’s endless staircase, but where he has doors, she has paintings. Paintings that move as they reenact the scenes they record, and Dipper watches himself bicker with Bill over the incantation, his heart aching. 

But they aren’t here for him. They’re here for Pacifica, who’s standing in front of a painting that shows Gideon, tearing through a room like a hurricane, books and smashed vases littered across the floor. “He’s always had a temper,” Pacifica says.

“Does he hit you?” Mabel, blunt and uncompromising.

“No,” Pacifica says. “No, he doesn’t have to.” A pause, then: “You know him. He can be so charming, so generous. Can make you feel like you’re the only thing that matters in the entire world. But…” She trails off, Mabel squeezes a little harder on her hand. Somewhere, deep beneath them, Dipper thinks he hears a rumble. “But he’s not always like that,” Pacifica finishes. “And when he’s not… He scares me, sometimes.”

They continue up the hallway. Dipper’s not sure what he was expecting, but most of what they see is unhappy and untroubled. Snapshots of a beautiful lavish life, lead by beautiful lavish people. Pacifica’s memories of Gideon are, except for those from the last few days, warm and romantic. As if she truly did love him, and he her.

Bill marches up ahead, uninterested in the displays. He doesn’t limp here, Dipper notes, though he doesn’t float, either, and his face is still a mess of stitches and bruising. He takes them down a long corridor with low lights and dark walls, little cherubs hanging off the cornices. All the painting here are of Gideon; at the opera, at restaurants, dancing in a tuxedo.

“This… this is when we were dating,” Pacifica says.

Each painting, Dipper notices, is partially obscured by a dark velvet drape. He begins to feel something churning in his stomach, sick and queasy.

Bill stops down the far end, in front of a large painting of Gideon leaning on a balustrade, sipping a glass of champagne. Fireworks explode in the background, and Dipper recognizes the view as being from Northwest Manor.

“New Year’s,” Pacifica says. “This is when we met. It was… Gideon says it was love at first sight.” She walks closer to the painting, hand touching the drape that covers the second half. 

Dipper shares a look with his sister. Neither say a word.

“What he says doesn’t matter,” Bill says. “This time, you get to decide.”

Pacifica swallows, her voice a whisper as she says, “What if I don’t want to know?”

Bill shrugs. Mabel says, “Whatever you decide, we’re here for you.”

Pacifica closes her eyes, hand trembling. Somewhere behind them, a thousand happy memories dance brightly in their frames. She drops her hand, turns. Walks one step.

Then she spins back around, grabbing the drape and pulling it from the painting with a scream.

In the painting, past-Pacifica leans against the balcony, phone in hand, typing even as she rolls her eyes at Gideon’s advances. It doesn’t, Dipper knows, mean anything in isolation. So it wasn’t love at first sight like Gideon claims, so what? Happens all the time.

But it’s not one obfuscated memory that’s the problem. It’s all the others, too.

* * *

It’s an awful unveiling, but Pacifica does it. Dipper feels sick as he watches, sees the Pacifica in the paintings wearing down with each successive “date”, going from cold and unreceptive, to slightly dazed, to vacantly happy. All the while, the rage of her current self grows hot enough to blow the lights, bulb by popping bulb.

At one point, Pacifica’s arm darts out, fingers forming into perfectly manicured talons, ready to tear Gideon right out of her mind.

Bill stops her, hand grabbing her wrist. “If you damage it,” he says. “You won’t be able to get it back.”

“Maybe I don’t want to get it back!” Pacifica’s voice is pain and rage that shakes the ground beneath them.

“They’re your memories,” Bill says, dropping her hand. “If you’d rather forget, forget.”

Pacific reaches her claws back up, gets halfway to slashing straight through painting-Gideon’s leering face. Then she stops. “No,” she says. “No, I want to remember why I hate him.” She pauses, looking around the unveiled gallery, drapes pooling across the floor. “Are there more?”

“Yes,” says Bill, and shows her.

The other veiled paintings are scattered; scenes of magic, of Dipper and Mabel, of Gideon’s explosive rage. Pacifica’s right; he never hits her. He doesn’t have to, not when he can control what she remembers, come the morning.

“I keep waking up in other places in the house,” Pacifica says. “On the couch in my study, in one of the spare rooms. I’d feel like I’d been crying the night before, but I’d never remember why. Giddy— Gideon used to tell me I’d been drinking. That I’d passed out and had a hangover. I considered going to AA. But he convinced me I didn’t need it. That I was just under stress. From looking after Daddy’s business.”

“Pacifica…” Mabel starts, then doesn’t seem to know where to go.

“Did he have you do this?” To Bill, who nods. “Why? Why do this to me? I always… I always tried to be kind to you! You seemed so angry, so alone. I just wanted you to be happy!”

Bill says: “Many years ago, your husband… tricked”—spat out like a confession—“me out of two things that were mine; my bell, and my eye. With the latter, he controls my power. With the former, he could control me.”

“’Could control’?”

“I, um. I have the bell,” Dipper confesses. “We took it from him the other day.”

“And the eye?” Pacifica continues. “What do you mean he controls ‘your power’? Does that… does that mean he could do all this”—a gesture around them—“again?”

“No,” Bill says. “The Mindscape is my domain. Without me as a conduit, your husband’s ability to control it is limited.” A pause. “Besides, the location you are now, the Mystery Shack, is heavily warded. He can’t get to anyone who remains there. Not this way.”

Dipper thinks of Ford’s warning,  _roads it has cut cannot be fully healed_ , and thinks of a black hand wreathed in blue flame. Of standing outside his own body, looking on in horror.

Instead, he says: “What do you mean limited? What  _could_  he do?” He figures that if Bill is in a talking mood, there’s no reason not to take advantage. He’s also pretty sure Bill’s compulsion to obey his commands doesn’t extend to answering simple questions, not if the cold metal of the bell is any indication. 

Bill scowls, but if it’s in irritation at Dipper or his question, Dipper isn’t sure. Neither, it turns out, is Bill sure of the answer.

“I’ve been asking myself that for years,” he snaps. “I can feel him try and use it, but separated in this body”—a gesture down at himself—“I can’t tell what his purpose is.”

“We could try looking through great uncle Ford’s journals,” Mabel suggests. “There might be a clue?”

But Bill just waves the suggestion away. “Already scoured. There’s nothing.”

“Wait. What?” From Dipper. “When? Those were locked up!”

“In a basement I had an access code to, yes,” Bill says. “And the wards don’t work on me if I’m in a human body. Obviously.”

“Wait a sec,” from Mabel. “Why would Gideon need to break in and commit arson to get into a place you could already get into? Whatever he needed to steal, why wouldn’t he just get you to sneak in and do it?”

“Because,” Dipper says, “he doesn’t want Bill to know what he took. He doesn’t want anyone to know. That’s why he killed Grunkle Stan”—Pacifica startles at this, but says nothing—“and wanted to buy the Shack, so he could get access to the basement without anyone realizing there was something specific he wanted.” Dipper rounds on Bill, “Your ‘eye’,” he says. “What is it? No metaphors or abstractions or hedging. What, actually, is it?”

Bill hesitates, but only for a moment, and the bell hangs cold against Dipper’s skin. “It’s me,” he says eventually. “It’s my body.”

“Gideon… has your body?”

Bill sighs. “Simplified to words you meatsacks can understand? Yes.”

Dipper’s expression curls into something horrified. He can’t help it. “He threw you out of your own body, which he’s using for some nefarious purpose you’re dimly aware of but can’t identify?” Bill gives a half shrug, and Dipper’s whole self shudders. “Oh, dude,” he says. “No. No no no, that is not okay.” And suddenly, he thinks he gets it. Because all this time they’ve assumed Bill is some kind of incorporeal spirit, some mental ghost. But he’s not. He’s a corporeal entity, existing in dimensions beyond the three that they, as humans, inhabit. So  _of course_  he’d have a body, and of course the part of him that they’ve met—floating triangle or possessed flesh—is just as detached from it as they themselves are when standing in the Mindscape. 

Dipper has a sudden, sharp desire to know what Bill really looks like. Even if it’s horrific, or inhuman, or so far beyond understanding that his senses can’t process it. He wants, more than anything else in that moment, to be someone Bill would consider showing his true self  _to_. Dipper has no idea whether he doesn’t because it’s taboo or inter-dimensional logistics mean he just can’t or he’s just never bothered or he has but not to Dipper. Has no idea, but wants to have one. 

“Gideon told me he has Bill ‘contained’.” Mabel, voice thoughtful. “How would he do that? Where would he do it?”

Everyone looks at Bill, who looks away, brow furrowed in irritation. “If I knew, why do you think I’d be wasting my time here?”

“I thought you knew how to get back to your body?” says Dipper.

“I do,” Bill says. “Not in any way that helps you.”

“Well… Do you remember anything?” Pacifica tries. “Anything at all? What… what did you feel when it happened? What are we even looking for? An object, a place? How big would it be?”

“I said I don’t  _know_.” And, for an instant, Bill flashes. Black and red and white, the colors inside out even for his human form.

“Okay.” Dipper holds up his hands, placating. “It’s okay. We’re sorry. We’re just trying to help.”

Bill snorts, looking away. Then he says, “The last time, after the motorcycle accident. I thought I smelt pine trees.”

Dipper blinks. “Pine… trees?”

“Pine trees and shooting stars.”

“What do—?” Mabel starts, but Dipper already knows the answer. Has smelt it a million times in his dreams.

“Burning wood,” he says. “He smelt burning wood.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Bill snaps, fingers clenched tight around his cane. “I don’t even have a  _nose_.”

And then Pacifica snaps her fingers.

“I know where he is,” she says.

* * *

It’s a lumber mill.

“Giddy convinced Daddy to let him manage it when we got engaged.” They’re back in the real world, clustered around a tourist map of Gravity Falls, hastily retrieved from the gift shop. One of Pacifica’s exquisitely manicured nails is pointing to the location in question, a little way out of town. “He was very insistent on it. Daddy thought it was cute, that he was trying to play heir.” The words cut like a blade and burn like bile, but Pacifica’s always been the proverbial velvet gloved iron fist.

“So he had you longer than the mill,” Dipper says to Bill. “That means he must’ve moved you there. That means he  _could_  have moved you there.”

“In that case,” Mabel says, “why the mill in particular? What’s there?”

One of Bill’s blue-nailed fingers appears on the map’s surface, the polish chipped all around the edge. He starts tracing lines, intersecting over and over around the mill. “You know there are places in this town,” he says, “where the plane of one reality intersects against another.”

“So the mill is like the Mystery Shack?” Dipper asks. “An intersection?”

“No,” Bill says. “It’s the opposite. When you create a furrow in the earth, what are you left with?”

“A groove,” Pacifica says. “And two walls of displaced dirt. That’s what the mill is. It’s not a place where reality is thin, it’s a place where it’s  _strong_.”

“Clever.”

“But what would Gideon want with that?”

“I don’t know.” Bill’s finger is off the map, is now running over and over across his split lower lip. Dipper wants to kiss it. He wants to kiss Bill. More importantly, he wants Bill to kiss him. Not like last night, or not just like that. He wants Bill to kiss him like he kissed the Dipper of last week, strange and yearning and tender.

He is so, so screwed.

* * *

Or he will be. Maybe. One day.

But first, he has to do this.

He waits until after dinner, until Mabel and Pacifica are in the spare room, their soft voices humming in the walls. Dipper retreats to his room, his notebooks spread out across the table, scrawled-out and crossed over workings for the bell cipher dancing on the pages. He’s very close, he knows he is. One more evening, he thinks, and he’ll know it. Bill’s true name. Then he’ll have power over a demon until the day he dies.

Dipper picks up every notebook, every scrap of paper, ever  _pen_  he’s written with. He puts them all under one arm. Then he goes hunting for two other things. Then he looks for Bill.

Bill is, once again, sitting in his nest beside the Sascrotch, still and unmoving, like he’s just staring at the wall. Dipper wonders if it’s something he should be worried about, some manifestation of depression, or whether it’s just Bill. Maybe Bill doesn’t get bored, or experience time like humans do. Maybe sitting in the dark staring at nothing is how he sleeps, or meditates, or just turns off. Dipper has no idea, and it occurs to him that sums up too much of his relationship with Bill. He doesn’t know. But he wants to.

The metal trash bin hits the floor with a clang, and Bill looks up, eye narrowed. Dipper shows him the notebooks. Not speaking, but Bill knows what it is he’s seeing.

Then Dipper drops the whole lot into the bin, paper and pens and all. Then he lights a match, and drops that in as well.

“I didn’t figure it out,” he says.

“I know,” says Bill.

Dipper nods. Then he pulls the bell from around his neck, and holds it out. “Here,” he says.

Bill doesn’t move.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Dipper says. “It’s not for you. Not just for you. It’s for me, too. I’m not going to be your Gideon. There’s no excuse for that, no greater good, no long-term plan. And I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. I do know how I can treat people today. So I’ve decided I don’t care if this was your plan all along, if this is all just some long con to get the bell back because you think I’ll be easier to guilt out of it than Gideon was. If that’s the case, I’m okay with being that guy. I’d rather be that guy than the alternative. So, here. It’s yours. I’m giving it to you. You can have this, then we’ll get your body back, and congratulations. You’ll have won. Back to your old self.”

Bill says:

“You can never go back, Pine Tree. That’s the point.” And he reaches out, long black fingers wrapping around brass that glows gold in the dim light of the notebook fire.

Dipper releases the cord, and for one moment, the bell is resting wholly in Bill’s hand. Then there’s a flare of cold blue fire, and it’s gone.

For a moment, neither of them move. Their hands are so close, the slightest move and they’d be linked. And Dipper could pull Bill up or Bill could pull him down, and maybe it wouldn’t matter because it’d be the two of them. No bells, no secrets, no hidden memories. Just bad blood and a new start, bones slowing knitting beneath the stitches.

Bill’s lips part, a row of sharp little teeth glinting in the light. “Pine Tree,” he starts.

And that’s all he manages, before the smoke from the trash bin sets off the detector.

* * *

That night, he doesn’t sleep. Just sits awake in the darkness behind the Sascrotch, a blanket across his lap and the warmth of Bill next to his shoulder. They didn’t talk, but Dipper listened. Now, the only thing he can hear are distant crickets and the much closer scrape of Bill’s snore.

Dipper keeps thinking:  _There was something in the basement. Something Gideon wouldn’t want Bill to know he wanted._  He keeps trying to think what it could have been. Gideon had the power to command Bill to do almost anything, by word or by pain. So whatever he was looking for, Dipper realizes it must have been something Bill would rather die—truly die, whatever that means to something like Bill—than allow someone like Gideon to retrieve. He tries to think what Bill could fear more than agony or oblivion. What fate worse than death or eternal imprisonment?

The clue is in the cipher, Dipper thinks, and pun very much intended. Something about the bell cipher, a word in itself but also, somehow, part of a larger whole.

When Dipper jerks upright, the motion wakes up Bill, as well. Bill snorts, and curses, and gets halfway through complaining when Dipper says:

“I know what Gideon took.”

And they are so, so screwed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dun dun [duuuuun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qjKHorRZg4)...


	10. Day 12

This time, they go in with a plan. Dipper doesn’t necessarily like the plan, but even Bill agrees it’s better than fronting up to Gideon in the middle of the day like they did last time.

This time, it’s Pacifica doing the fronting.

“This isn’t right,” Dipper hisses, not for the first time. “We shouldn’t be making her do this.”

“It was her idea, remember. And ssh!” Mabel puts a mittened hand over his mouth for emphasis.

They’re in Stan’s car, hunkering low in the seats, parked on a stretch of road not far from Northwest Manor. Bill is fairly sure the area isn’t surveilled, but they pulse it with the EMP anyway. If anyone is watching, it’ll be suspicious, but at least privately so.

They’re waiting for Pacifica. She’s in the Manor. With Gideon. Alone. And Mabel is right, this was Pacifica’s idea. It doesn’t mean Dipper has to like it.

“Something’s wrong.” This from the back seat. Bill’s stretched out along the length, staring up at the car’s roof, hands folded across his chest. In defiance of Mabel’s shushing, he doesn’t bother to lower his voice when he speaks.

“What? If Pacifica’s in trouble—” Now Mabel isn’t bothering to whisper either.

But Bill just says: “Not her. Something else. I…” He trails off, scowling. “Can’t you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“Singing.”

Dipper and Mabel share a look. They try to listen, they really do. But all Dipper can hear are owls and crickets and the faint roar of cars passing down below. “We can’t hear anything,” he says.

Bill thinks for a moment. Then says, “Ah. Then perhaps Ms. Northwest would be so kind as to hurry.”

“Why?”

“Because I think we’re running out of time.”

“What do you mean?”

But it’s Mabel who answers: “If Gideon thinks we’re on to him, he’s probably going to bring forward his Timeline of Evil.”

Truth be told, they still don’t really know what that timeline is. They know what Gideon’s got and they’re pretty sure about where he’s got it. They’re definitely convinced they need to stop him. Beyond that, they’ve no idea.

The banging on his window makes Dipper scream, just a little, but when he whirls to look, it’s Pacifica’s eyes that stare back at him. He opens the door, and she pushes in, Dipper making room by scrambling and tumbling into the backseat. He lands in an awkward pile of displaced limbs and annoyed Bill.

“Pacifica, what—?” Mabel starts.

“Go, go! I’ve got it.” Pacifica holds up a white plastic access card. Her grin is big and bright beneath the thin slash of the waning moon, her eyes hard and manic.

“Did he buy it?” Mabel asks, even as she starts the car.

“Who  _cares_ ,” Pacifica says. “I spun him a sob story about how ‘confused’ and ‘scared’ I was, and what ‘awful lies’ you told me about him.” The scorn in her voice is practically eating holes in the windshield. “’Oh, Giddy. The things they were saying, magic and demons. You were right, sweetie. They are crazy. I’m so sorry I ever doubted you. I… I think I need a drink.’” Pacifica snorts. “Then I slipped the sedative in his nightcap and, boom. That’s all she wrote.” Her voice is not the voice, Dipper thinks, of a woman who cares whether her soon-to-be-ex-husband was taking the correct dosage.

He says: “The card will get us into the mill?”

“No,  _I’ll_  get us into the mill,” Pacifica says. “It’s my mill. The card will get us into Gideon’s office.”

“Then let’s drive!” Mabel announces, and floors it.

The jolt reminds Dipper to buckle up, and he looks over to remind Bill to do the same. But Bill isn’t listening. Bill is hunched over, hands over his ears, eye closed, rocking back and forth. His lips are moving, saying something over and over but Dipper can’t hear what it is.

When Dipper’s fingers brush his shoulder, Bill startles, head jerking up. “It’s coming,” he says.

“What is?”

Bill’s hand darts out, grabbing Dipper’s jacket and pulling him close. “I tried to stop you,” he hisses. “Before. You were young and dumb, didn’t know what you’d stumbled into. I thought I’d have to trick you out of it. I always had to before. Don’t open it, don’t open it, don’t open it. Don’t. Fucking. Open it. I tried playing nice, at first. Oblivious, squirming little meatsacks, dying in the dark. Like puppies, how could you kick them? But they kept. Pissing. On. The. Carpet. Over and over and over and over. And I had to keep cleaning it up. And every time, every time the song got a little louder, the eye opened a little further. What was I supposed to  _do_?” His own eye is wide and bright, all white and blue and torn black slit.

Very gently, Dipper prises Bill’s fingers from his jacket. Laces them with his own. “Bill,” he says. “Slow down. I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

“I know,” Bill says. “Linear little globs with linear little minds. You don’t need to understand, you need to listen. There aren’t going to be many other chances.”

“This is about the portal,” Dipper says. 

“It isn’t a portal,” Bill says. “It’s a pinhole. How do you fit a camel through a needle’s eye? Chop it fine, feed it piece by screaming piece. Anything can happen in a dream but this universe is only three dimensions. Build too much between the gaps and everything unfolds.”

“Something’s trying to come through.” Interpreting Bill is like trying to reconstruct a David Lynch film without the visuals, but Dipper thinks he gets it.

“Something already has,” Bill says. “A finger in the dyke, a hair threaded through the needle. That’s not the problem. It’s the rest you need to fear.” Then, suddenly, he’s leaning forward, lips parted for a kiss. 

Dipper is all-too-happy to oblige him. They meet in the middle, Dipper’s fingers curling into Bill’s hair, hard enough to hurt. Bill makes a strange sound, not quite a sigh, not yet a moan. Then he’s pulling back, not far, his breath ghosting across Dipper’s skin as he says, “Needing to go for a drive didn’t mean I wanted to be rebuilt as a Honda. Especially not one made of filth and rotting meat. It’s so different, like this. So static, so permanent. It drives me mad, I hate it. I want to hate it, but…” Another kiss, just a light brush of tongue a lips. “But some things I hate less than others.”

Dipper gives a breathless little laugh. “Gee,” he says. “You romantic, you.”

“The moon is an eye and the world is a hologram. Remember the only thing that matters in the end. Remember your sister’s been asleep at the wheel for the last five minutes and the road hasn’t noticed.”

That does get Dipper’s attention. “What?” He jerks upright, looks around. The car is still running but the world has stopped moving. Still, the road vanishes under the headlights like the belt of a treadmill, cast in silver gray.

“Mabel!” Dipper shouts. “Mabel wake up!”

This isn’t, in retrospect, the wisest thing for him to have done. Mabel does wake, screaming even as color races back into the world. Color and light and sound, the angry blare of an oncoming semi, and Mabel wrenches to wheel to the side. Then the world spins, and Dipper’s head cracks hard against the ceiling. He loses time and loses consciousness, and when the world comes back it smells like burning rubber and there’s shattered glass all over his lap.

He has a sudden panic that he needs to get out, that they’ve just come off the road, just smashed into a tree. And he’s seen this, in a million movies and TV shows, and he knows the acrid smell of smoke and can guess how long it will take before the gas tank lights and everything goes up in flames.

The door opens, and Dipper gets halfway out before he realizes his seatbelt is still buckled. By the time he’s popped that and stumbled from the car, warm hands are gripping his shoulders and helping him up. Mabel. Mabel’s head is bleeding but she’s okay, and Dipper grabs onto her like he’s never going to let go. On the far side of the car, he can see Pacifica, stumbling but alive.

He doesn’t see Bill.

“What was that?” From Pacifica.

“I think… I think we got hit by a bubble of Mindscape.” Even as Mabel talks, Dipper is struggling out of her arms. All he can think of is Bill, still in the car.

“That can’t be a good sign.”

“We’ve had this before. Kinda. Back then it was gravity anomalies.”

“A different sort of portal?”

The women are talking, but Dipper isn’t listening. He’s hauling himself around to the far side of the car. Bill is still in there, and Dipper has to get him out. The whole thing’s gonna explode, and Bill isn’t moving, is slumped at a strange angle and isn’t that just Bill in a nutshell, all strange angles, and he’ll be fine, he has to be fine, because he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt but he’s a demon he’s always fine and the door won’t open but Dipper makes it, metal screaming and glass falling in a glittering shower in the cold golden light of the moon, glittering and there’s Bill and his eye is closed and all Dipper can see beyond that is the blood.

“No…”

He falls to his knees. He has to get Bill out, has to, and he’s reaching in, hands slippery over wet skin and then Bill groans, head rolling and eye opening and it doesn’t focus but what Bill says is:

“The fragility of human life.”

“Bill! Bill, you’ll be okay. I just have to—”

“Can’t feel my legs,” says Bill, and his voice sounds like it’s coming from very far away. “Can’t feel much of anything. Probably for the best.”

Dipper’s arms are around Bill’s chest and he lifts, lifts with every ounce of strength he has. And Bill might not be able to feel much but he can feel that, crying out in such pain that Dipper stops.

“Guess that’s it for this one,” Bill is saying. “Don’t worry ‘bout it. ‘ll be f-fine. Just— jus’ gotta…”

“Bill! Stay with me, Bill. We’ll call an ambulance, we’ll—”

Then Bill’s hand is grasping for his jacket, leaving big dark smears in its wake. “No time,” he says, the words abruptly sharp and lucid. “Get Gideon. It’ll… It’ll be fine.” Then he sighs, a deep and final exhalation. “See you in your dreams, Pine Tree.”

And then he’s gone.

* * *

In the end, the car does not explode. The car does not explode and Bill is dead and there’s no time to mourn. Not when another bubble of Mindscape opens right on top of them, world turning silver-gray and trees extending up so high into the heavens they can’t see a single branch. Just massive trunks, ascending into mist.

Dipper isn’t sure what he’d be mourning, anyway. A part of him knows Bill is fine, for a given definition of fine. It’s just his vessel that he’s lost, damaged beyond repair. He can get another. He’s done this before. Given his attitude to pain and mortality, Dipper’s sure he’ll do it again. Bill isn’t human, a human death isn’t his end.

That’s one part. The other part of Dipper just watched his boyfriend bleed out, cradled in his arms. He wants to  _howl_ , to scream his loss into the trees. He doesn’t. Instead he stands up, wipes off as much of Bill’s blood as he can bear, and says, “We have to keep moving.”

“Dipper…” Mabel’s looking between him and Bill’s— between him and the empty shell, still trapped inside the car. Pacifica has both hands over her mouth, tears cutting bright channels down her smudged cheeks.

“He’s not dead,” Dipper tells her. “That was just a body. But it means Gideon has him now.” One dead body with no identity. It occurs to Dipper he may need a favor from Robbie at some point in the future.

Pacifica lowers her hands. Her eyes don’t quite leave the wreck but she nods, lips thin and fixed and set. “I understand,” she says, and Dipper realizes she probably does. Better than any of them. “Let’s go.”

Dipper doesn’t know how long they walk before the Mindscape pops. Because it’s the Mindscape, and time and space don’t work the way they should.

“It’s not far,” Pacifica says when they’re out, getting her bearings from the road and from the trees. “I can smell it. Daddy would take me to visit sometime when I was little. I always loved the smell.” Pine trees and burning, Bill had been right about that. Tonight, there’s something else; a sharp crackle of ozone, dialed up like a storm. 

They pass through two more Mindscapes before they reach the mill. Dipper doesn’t know whose they are or if that’s even the right question to ask. So much he doesn’t know, and he vows to ask Bill about it when this is all over. To sit down and really listen, about what Bill is and where he’s from, about his connection to the Mindscape, about the Mindscape itself. Because Dipper’s read Ford’s journals and he knows what his great uncle thought. But Ford was an interloper, a visitor to the realm Bill claims as his. And maybe that’s as self-aggrandizing as everything Bill does and maybe it its not. The point is, Dipper wants to hear Bill explain it, no matter how many times he gets accused of being a stupid meatsack in the process. 

When they get to it, the mill is… a mill. Logs and trees and huge sharp machines. Dipper’s no expert, but Pacifica is, and she marches them up to the entrance like she owns the place, which she does. There’s one security guard on duty, who stammers out something about Pacifica not being “authorized”, and earns such a dressing down in response that Dipper’s impressed the guy doesn’t wet himself.

“She’s really something, isn’t she?” he says to Mabel. His sister just nods, and Dipper can practically see the stars blossoming in her eyes.

* * *

“Here it is. Now, let’s try this…” Pacifica, standing outside one of the most locked looking doors Dipper has ever seen. It’s trying hard to seem like an ordinary office, FOREMAN GLEEFUL written in brass letters in the center. But Dipper would bet his lost hat the thing would survive a bombing.

The pass card works, the swipe pad going green when Pacifica waves over it. Then there’s a sound like a dozen huge steel bolts sliding out of place, and the door swings itself inwards.

“Creepy,” Mabel says. Dipper does not offer a dissenting opinion.

The office inside is… an office. Dipper asks: “What are we looking for?”

“I’ll know it when I see it,” is Pacifica’s answer.

There’s a desk, a pot plant, a laptop. A pile of papers, reports on lumber futures and export regulations and other things Dipper has no interest in. A large picture window has a really killer view of the waterfall, and Dipper’s mind provides him with the memory of looking over the same, this time with Bill’s breath hot against his lips.

The memory is not conducive to paying attention, and Dipper knows he should let it go. If he ever wants another, he needs to concentrate. To pay attention to the here-and-now, to look for… whatever. Not think of how smooth Bill’s lips are, how smooth they were. Not think of ink-black fingers, gentle on the soft flesh of his neck. Not think of—

“Hngh!”

—his face, slamming into the ugly rug.

“Dipper! Are you okay? Be careful!” And then Mabel is there, helping him up, and Dipper’s jaw has decided to remind him about the time he punched it. “What happened?” Mabel asks.

“I tripped. On the rug.” This is true. One corner of the rug, curled over rather than lying flat. And for a moment, the three of them stare at it.

Then Pacifica runs forward and throws the whole thing back.

“A-hah!”

There’s a trapdoor. That’s what the rug had been covering. It has a single button on the front, currently glowing red. Nothing happens when they press it.

“It’s locked,” Pacifica says.

“How does it unlock?” From Mabel.

“I don’t know. There has to be something. Keep looking.”

The women do, pulling books from the shelves and paintings from the wall. Dipper, still on his ass on the floor, thinks about Pacifica’s pass card. One card to get in, no obvious mechanism on the trapdoor. That means, whatever opens it, has to be in the room. A secret switch, a hidden keypad. Dipper tries to think it through. How would he do it? One card, two doors. An extra mechanism adds complexity, a code to forget, a key to lose. A hidden button risks discovery. A door hidden beneath a rug, but if a cleaner should flick a switch? Or, worse, walk past while the rug was pulled aside.

Dipper stands up. Then he closes the office door.

The light on the trapdoor turns green.

* * *

There’s a ladder. Pacifica descends first, then Mabel, then Dipper, bringing up the rear. He thinks they climb maybe ten feet, descending into the earth beneath the mill. The ladder ends in a concrete tunnel, well lit and big enough to drive a truck through. A big truck.

“This,” Pacifica says, “was not here when I was a child.”

They walk the tunnel. Dipper feels his sister’s hand slip into his, and he accepts it with a reassuring squeeze. It suddenly occurs to him that they’re no longer children. And adult Gideon? Adult Gideon already has Pines’ blood on his hands.

Then again, Dipper has Bill’s.

The tunnel ends in a huge pair of blast doors, big and heavy and steel. There’s no obvious way to open them, and Dipper is about to say something to that effect when an orange emergency light on the ceiling begins to flash.

Then the doors pull back. And a voice says:

“Honestly, I’m surprised it took you this long.”

At the sound of it, Pacifica’s eyes go very, very round. Dipper knows this, because he’s looking at her. So is Mabel. Their expressions are equally furious.

“I…” Pacifica looks between them. “He was sleeping when I left. I swear it!”

Through the opened blast doors, Dipper can see a console room. A small space filled with flashing lights and blinking buttons, magitek symbols glowing on every surface. Beyond that, is a thick, glass window. And beyond that?

Beyond that stands Gideon Gleeful.

“It’s like you people don’t understand the expression ‘human cloning’,” he says, voice tinny through the speakers. Even from this distance, Dipper can see the slimy grin on his piggy little face.

One Gideon in the Manor, one in the bunker. Dipper has a sudden memory of trying to impress Wendy at a party, of all things, because that was what his life was, circa twelve years old.

And at twenty-two, it’s this.

“Well,” says Gideon. “Don’t stand out in the corridor. You might as well come in. You’re just in time, after all.”

It’s Pacifica who accepts the invitation first. “In time for what?” she says, voice strong and even.

“Why, for the dawn of a new era!” Gideon gestures, a grand sweep to present the device that stands behind him. It’s almost exactly as Dipper remembers it. Three straight lines and a circle, smeared with a jar full of rift, stolen from the Mystery Shack and brought here, to a place where the world is thickest, where the drilling between realities could be the most precise. A huge room for a huge device, and Gideon stands on a platform before it, arms raised like a man receiving benediction.

And where Stanford’s portal pointed to the earth, Gideon’s rises to the heavens. And, judging from the light and from the noise, it’s opening.

Pacifica says:

“Giddy? What… what are you talking about?”

“Oh, Pacifica,” Gideon says. “Your husband is so much more than you know. For he has heard the voice of God. I am His Vessel, His conduit upon this sinful Earth.” Gideon begins pacing, even as the light behind him grows. “He has looked upon us and despaired. He weeps for what worms we have become. And yet He is not without mercy, no. We have shut Him out but He yearns to be one with us one more. I heard Him, Pacifica. When I was a boy, He spoke to me, told me what works I must achieve. He is lost beyond the world, my love, but He once left a light to find his way. A tiny fragment of His magnificence, left to watch over all that He had wrought.” And here, Gideon produces something from a pocket. A glass sphere, no bigger than a baseball. “That fragment, that angel, was meant to guide us, but, oh! It did fall. Fall unto the sinful earth, rot within our soil. His messenger, corrupted. His message, lost.” A pause, then Gideon turns. Faces them once more. “But I found it, Pacifica. Found the lost piece of Providence. I tried to cleanse it of its sin. Lord knows I tried. But some stains run deep, some blood cannot be bleached away. And yet, all is not lost. For even through the dark, His light still shines. With this Conduit, with this Vessel, with this Light. I will receive Him. And all shall know His glory once again!”

Gideon, Dipper thinks, is entirely mad. Beyond Bill mad, beyond Ford, beyond McGucket. This is an entirely new class of mad, a Deluxe Mad Xtreem. From the expression on Mabel’s face, she thinks the same.

Pacifica says:

“Oh, Giddy. Why… I don’t understand. What have I done wrong? I love you! Haven’t I tried to love you? I—”

“W-what? Pacifica?” Then Mabel is stepping forward, horror dawning on her face. “No! What are you… what are you doing? Don’t you—”

“Stay back!” There’s a gun in Pacifica’s hand, pulled from her handbag. A gun in her hand, and it’s pointed at Mabel, and Dipper’s heart stops, just for a moment. “I said get back!” Pacifica says. “I won’t let you ruin this!”

Gideon says: “Pacifica?”

The gun is still trained on Mabel, but Pacifica’s attention is split. Half in front of her, half on the man behind the glass. “Oh, Giddy. I didn’t understand. So much pressure, so much responsibility! All on you, my love. I’m sorry. Sorry that I wasn’t enough, sorry that you couldn’t trust me. I—”

“Pacifica, no!” Then Gideon is rushing forward. There’s a door, Dipper realizes. Just to the left of the glass. If he had to guess, he’d say it only opens from the inside. “I thought you wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh, Giddy.” Pacifica backs up, spine pressed against the door, gun still trained on Mabel. “It doesn’t matter if I understand. All that matters is I love you. I’ve always loved you, light of my heart. Whatever strange journey you’re on, please. Take me with you.”

“Oh, Pacifica!” Gideon enters something into the keypad beside the door. The latter hisses open, and Pacifica steps through. Backwards, gun still trained on Mabel, not faltering until she’s over the threshold.

“Pacifica!” Mabel yells. “No!” She lunges forward.

“Mabel, no!”

Then the door is slamming shut, Mabel hitting the steel a fraction of a second too late. Through the glass, Dipper watches the Northwest-Gleeful reunion kiss. It’s like a car crash, he thinks. The same one that killed his boyfriend.

“Oh, Giddy,” Pacifica says. “I always knew you were special.”

“You’ve always had such and eye for fine things, my love.”

Pacifica giggles, swooning in her husband’s arms. “Show me,” she says. “Show me the light that will lead us to His glory.”

Gideon produces the globe again. Closer, Dipper thinks he can almost see something at the center. Some strange spot of darkness.

“Oh,” Pacifica says, fingers trailing across the glass. “It’s so beautiful. I can feel its  _power_.”

“Yes.” Gideon hisses the word, waving the globe back and forth like a sky-blue David Bowie. “Yes, feel His reflected glory!”

Pacifica’s groan is practically orgasmic. “A new world order,” she says. “Just for us.”

“Yes, love. Just for us.”

“Oh, Giddy. This is more than I’d ever imagined. Oh, I’m so  _happy_  I could just—”

When Pacifica moves, it’s almost too fast for Dipper to follow. One moment she’s locked in a nauseating swoon. The next, her hand has darted out, grabbing the globe from Gideon’s hand. Then she’s throwing it, straight onto the concrete.

“— _kill you_!” Pacifica finishes, voice a harpy’s shriek.

When the globe hits the floor, it smashes.

Gideon screams, a big “No!” to rival any  _Star Wars_  film. He backhands Pacifica, enough to send her falling. But she’s laughing, too. Laughing, even as the portal behind her powers up. Even as Dipper feels the earth tremble beneath his feet.

He wonders, in that moment, exactly how small a ten-dimensional thing could fold, if forced into three. One dark speck, held in the center of a sphere.

Pacifica isn’t the only one laughing. Not when color bleeds from the world, the Mindscape opening, a vast expanse of silver-gray, lit only by a gash of gold, unfolding like a tangram from the concrete.

And then:

“Bill. Cipher. Is. Back, baby!”

“Bill!”

It is, from his top hat to his cane, floating in the air, right behind one horrified Gideon Gleeful. Not that Bill is looking at Gideon.

“Oh, hey Pine Tree. Fancy meeting you here.” Bill’s eye curves, as if he’s grinning, his hand coming up and giving a little finger wave.

“Bill,” Dipper says. “Bill, you have to—”

But Bill isn’t listening. “Oh, man it’s  _so good_  to be out of that paperweight. I swear I’ve got this crick in my neck like you wouldn’t believe. And I don’t even have a neck! That’s how bad it— Whoa!” Because he’s turned, seen the portal behind him. “Speaking of how bad it is.” A conspiratorial gesture with one black thumb. “Hey, psst. That’s bad. You might wanna get that looked at by a professional.”

“Bill!” Dipper is pounding on the glass. Because Bill is  _right there_. He’s there, and he’s free, and the portal is opening and—

“Oh, hey hey hey! Say my name three times and I appear, and—” He vanishes. An instant later, Dipper feels a gust of something on his neck. He turns and— “Boom! Here I am!”

“Bill!” Dipper tries to grab him, but Bill moves too fast, backwards and away.

“Four times, that’s enough. Don’t make me confiscate that tongue, young man. Because”—a glance at his own wrist—“whoa look. At. That. Time. Stuck in a Christmas ornament for years and would you believe I left the oven on? True story. I’m gonna go fix that, you all look like you’re having fun without me so, hey. You do you! Me, I’m gonna make like a pine and burn to the ground. Remember what I said about the professional. And, hey. Pine Tree?” A sudden flash to red and white. “Say hello to your Grunkle for me. You’re gonna be seeing him  _real_  soon.”

And then there’s a flash—

“Bill!”

—and Bill is gone.

Dipper’s knees hit the concrete. For a moment, there’s silence. Just the building whir of the portal.

And then, very slowly, Gideon begins to laugh.

“Oh,” he says. “Oh, this is… Let me guess. You destroyed the bell? You destroyed it and you thought, oh. It won’t matter. It’s my  _friend_. It  _loves_  me. I’ll do what it wants, free it fwom the vewy, vewy bwad Wil’ Gwideon. The it will hewlp mwe fwite hwim.” A laugh, awful and echoing through the control room speakers. “You idiot! It’s a  _fucking demon_. It has no love, no sense of friendship. It  _used_  you. Used you to get what it wanted, and then it left, and you’re alone, and  _what_? What do you have, if you don’t have it? A neurotic nerd. A hysterical reject, born thirty years too late. And a weak-minded little daddy’s girl. You’re nothing! All of you! Nothing! I am the Vessel of a new God! Even now, He comes. Even if you kill me, I will be brought back by His glory! Face it, losers. It’s over. You tried, I’ll give you that. But you lost. Now it’s all over bar the clean-up. But don’t worry. I am not without mercy. You will be the first to witness my new Lord’s radiance. Witness it!”

Dipper doesn’t want to look. Doesn’t want to move. He thinks, if he does, his heart might just dissolve from his chest. Bounce across the floor like a cheap rubber prop. Because Gideon is right. He destroyed the bell. He thought love would be enough.

Stupid. Stupid, gullible little boy. And a decade may have gone but Dipper is still twelve years old, cold blue fire racing up his arm, watching his body from outside.

“Dipper. Look.”

Mabel. She’s standing in front of him and her hands are on his head. Trying to turn it around, and he resists, he really tries, but—

“Dipper!”

—but it’s his sister. So he turns, and sees…

He sees…

Three straight lines and a circle, eye glowing as big and as bright as the sun. Gideon stands beneath the platform, arms raised, waiting. There’s something in the light, Dipper realizes. A black slit, slowly opening. Growing bigger, getting closer.

And then it says:

“Hey, Lil’ Asswipe. Hope you’re hungry, ‘cause I got a knuckle sandwich right here with your name on it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Sorry not sorry](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aa-d3_E86U).


	11. Day ???

“Hey, Lil’ Asswipe. Hope you’re hungry, ‘cause I got a knuckle sandwich right here with your name on it.”

Three straight lines and a circle, a black hole in a greyscale world, eye glowing brighter than a sun. There’s a gash in that sun, one long black slit pupil, slowly rolling forward. Getting closer, getting detail.

Mabel’s hands are on Dipper’s head and he think his heart has stopped. It’s been ten years but he knows that voice, and it’s impossible. It has to be, because there’s a body in the morgue and a piece of paper with the lawyer. But none of that matters because the black shape steps out of the light, onto the platform before the portal, and he’s older, they all are, but still Dipper recognizes—

“Grunkle Stan!” Mabel is shrieking, racing to the glass, pounding it in joy.

Gideon, meanwhile, is less ecstatic. He takes a step backwards, then another. “No!” he says. “No, you’re dead. I saw it! I watched that worthless demon drive you off a cliff!”

And Dipper remembers Bill’s voice, quite clearly:  _”But that doesn’t mean he’s dead.”_

“I tried to tell you. But you were too busy punching me off the roof to listen.”

Funny, how Bill’s voice sounds very much like it’s coming from two inches behind Dipper’s ear. Funny, how Dipper can see the reflection of golden light, pulsing in the glass.

This time, when Dipper goes to grab him, Bill doesn’t move away. Dipper isn’t sure what he ends up holding. The feel of space beneath his grasp makes no sense against what his eyes can see, but it doesn’t matter. It’s Bill. He came back. He came back, and he brought the motherfucking _cavalry_.

“Hey hey hey, I love you too, Pine Tree, but you’re making me miss the best part.” Bill… inverts. Dipper doesn’t have a better word for it, only that he ends up hugging Bill against his chest like a schoolgirl with a diary, and then they’re both watching what’s happening through the glass.

Gideon is saying: “You can’t touch me! You hear me? You’re nothing! Just a bad dream, an unwanted memory!” But he’s stumbling backwards.

Stan, meanwhile, is advancing. Rolling up his sleeves like he has all the time in the world. Which, Dipper supposes, he might. Gideon’s not wrong; Stan’s not quite solid, a flicking blue-edged hologram, ghosted-in in post-production. He is not, in other words, a man in danger of getting any older.

And then he raises his fists, and cold blue fire bursts along the skin.

Bill  _howls_  laughter, his own small, black fists pounding on Dipper’s forearms in his excitement. “Yes!” he says. “Yes, oh yes! I have been waiting  _years_  for this!”

Stan says:

“Way I figure it, you owe a lotta people, kid. Little triangle guy—”

“That’s me!” Bill mock-whispers.

“—says I get to collect. So. Hold still. This is how it works, you asshole.” Stan swings, and Gideon tries to dodge. He really does. Tries, and fails. “You hurt my  _town_ ”—the first punch catches Gideon in the gut—“you hurt my  _friends_ ”—uppercut to the jaw—“you hurt  _me_ ”—left hook—“and, most of all, you hurt my  _family_!” This time, Stan’s fist goes  _through_  Gideon’s face, buried up to the elbow. No blood, no gore. Just a flare of cold blue fire, Gideon’s body going rigid and still. And then Stan’s arm is pulling back, out of Gideon’s body, a scrawny pink neck held within a meaty fist. 

Stan’s not as young as he used to be, or as alive, but he’s still strong enough to pull Gideon’s soul right out of his flesh. The flesh that slumps to the ground, unconscious and useless, even as Stan holds ghost-Gideon aloft.

“Hey,” Stan says. “Who wants some?” Then he drops Gideon to the ground.

Bill, who’s been busy miming punches, legs kicking in excitement, says: “Dramatic irony! My favorite part!” He leans forward, hands on Dipper’s forearm, flashing to red-white in his bloodlust. As he does so, Dipper feels something move behind him. Something huge and vast and unfathomable, a light he can’t see, a shape he can’t know, a geometry in ten dimensions. Suddenly, it occurs to Dipper that he’s not the one holding onto Bill. It’s Bill who’s holding onto him. It’s abstract, sensations and textures Dipper isn’t built for, but he tries to settle into the embrace, to acknowledge that he can feel it and that it’s okay. It’s terrifying, because there’s nothing about today that isn’t, but it’s… okay. Better than okay.

He thinks he can feel something tracing up the side of his cheek. He knows, if he looks, he’ll see nothing. So he doesn’t look.

Bill says, voice sedate, pitched just for Dipper: “That’s the problem with these half-baked Faust wannabes. Think they’re the one dick in a world full of suckers. A pissant handful of sand in their time glass, and they’re taking on the whole damn desert.”

Once upon a time, Dipper did a deal with a demon. He’d been twelve years old and not a master of thinking things through. He’s pretty sure he never would’ve foreseen this moment as a consequence. It occurs to him to wonder if Bill did. 

“What goes around comes around,” Bill says. “The universe is zero sum.”

Freed from Stan’s grasp, Gideon tries to run. Not for his own body, which Stan is blocking, but for Pacifica. Mabel sees it, yells out a warning, and Dipper gets halfway to jerking into motion himself before he feels the presence behind him increase, just slightly. As if Bill is urging him to stay put. 

“Ssh. Just watch. I told you, this is the good bit.”

The light from the portal is blinding and the shadows in the room are long. Too long, Dipper realizes. Too long and too solid, solid enough for Gideon to trip, to go down hard on his face on the concrete.

“You done a lot of bad things in your short life, kid,” Stan says, walking forward. “I can’t say I don’t know what that’s like.”

Gideon tries to get upright, but the shadows are heavy on him, now. Banded across his arms, his back, his legs. He manages to flip himself over, scrambling on his ass across the floor. “You stay away from me!” he says. “I am nothing like you! Nothing!” He holds up a hand, as if in warding. Or tries to, the shadows pulling it back down with the inexorability of gravity.

Stan just sighs, squatting down in front of the struggling Gideon. “Kid, shit catches up. The triangle, he reckons I should let you drown in it. Me, I think you deserve a chance. Everyone deserves a chance, even shitscum like you. But you gotta want it. That weight you feel? That weight’s guilt. It eats you. Literally. I’m told it’s an ‘unsubtle metaphor’.” Stan does the air quotes. “So I did a deal for you, kid. The place you’re going, there’s a door. Maybe you find it in a day, maybe you find it in a week. Maybe you never find it. You wanna do better, be better? Then the door’ll be there. Otherwise, I’d get real cozy with your demons. ‘Cause you’re gonna be seeing a lot more of them.”

“Ironic hell,” Bill says. Dipper’s amazed that a guy with no mouth is still able to communicate such a smug grin. “I love ironic hell.”

“Did… Is that true?” Dipper asks. “Did Grunkle Stan really do a deal with you to save Gideon?”

“Yup.”

“What did you get out of it?”

“You’re looking at it, Pine Tree.” Bill gestures to the scene in front of them. “I asked him to punch Gideon in the face. That’s what he wanted in return.”

Dipper suddenly has such as sharp pang of pride and heartache that it nearly sends him to his knees. Pride, that his great uncle is the sort of man who’d sell his soul to a demon to give a hated enemy a second chance. Heartache, that Dipper’s time with him was cut so short.

“By the way,” Bill says. “You know the ‘deals’ aren’t real, right? I just say that because people expect it. It’s not binding.”

“Yeah,” Dipper says. “I know. I figured that out after you destroyed Ford’s laptop.”

“Touché.” Dipper’s not sure whether that’s actual contrition or just his own wishful thinking.

Either way, Gideon is screaming again, trying to scramble backwards. More and more shadows gather over him, and Dipper begins to see the shape of them. The silhouettes of people. It’s only when Dipper recognizes himself and Mabel and Pacifica and Bill that he knows what he’s looking at; the memories of everyone Gideon’s hurt. Their hands tear at the man, literally tearing, chunks coming away is flares of cold-bright blue. It’s awful to watch, someone being burnt alive. Even Bill’s earlier bloodlust seems to have abated, and he watches, still and silent, limbs hanging limp and eye unblinking. He’s holding Dipper tightly, however, or at least that’s how Dipper interprets the sensation. Almost like Bill’s forgotten his two-dimensional puppet-shape, retreating back into his true form even as he’s seeking comfort against the scene before him.

Revenge, Dipper thinks, really isn’t all that sweet. It’s just tragic. Hollow. Watching the ghost of a man being torn apart by his own bad choices, screaming curses all the while.

Somewhere on the far side of the glass, Pacifica is sobbing quietly into her hand. On this side, Mabel does the same.

* * *

When it’s over, they’re left with one ghostly Grunkle, a catatonic Gideon clone—or maybe the original, Dipper doesn’t know and, honestly, doesn’t care—and a still-glowing portal.

Mabel is the first to move, banging on the glass, yelling Stan’s name. He sees her, and for a moment Dipper wishes Bill hadn’t EMP’d his phone. Because Stan’s expression is one of such pure, priceless joy Dipper wants to preserve it for the ages. Or at least for Facebook. And meanwhile, Stan runs towards the door, then straight through it, even as Pacifica struggles with the lock.

Stan might go through the metal, but he can pick up Mabel well enough. Pick her up and spin her around, the two of them laughing and crying and so happy Dipper’s heart feels like it just might burst.

Bill, meanwhile, has disentangled himself, floating over to the door.

“Pacifica,” he says, and the woman in question looks up. If she’s surprised to be addressed by a floating anthropomorphic triangle in abstracted evening wear, she hides it very quickly.

“Bill?” she says.

“Yes,” says Bill. “But no. I mean PACIFICA. That’s the door code. PACIFICA.”

Pacifica has a moment of expression that Dipper can’t decipher. Can’t, and maybe doesn’t want to. But then there’s the echoed  _beep-beep-beep_  of a keypad, and the door swings open.

Then Pacifica’s back in the console room, and Dipper goes to her. “This is a dumb question,” he says. “But are you okay?”

Dumb or not, she gives it thought. “I… I will be,” she says. “I just… I have too…”

“I understand,” says Dipper. He’s not sure that he does, not really. He’s not sure how the thing he has with Bill maps against the thing Pacifica may or may not have with Gideon. But if there’s anyone in the room who maybe, just maybe, has a chance of knowing how she feels, he figures it might as well be him. The offer’s there, anyway.

And then a voice says:

“Hey. Dipper.”

Dipper turns. He turns, and there’s Stan, not three feet away. Suddenly, Dipper doesn’t know what to do. With his face, with his limbs, with his anything. His mind is racing a mile a minute, turning over a thousand memories, a thousand words, a thousand apologies. His heart pounds, his palms sweat. He opens his mouth to speak, to say something,  _anything_ , and all that comes out is a soft gust of air.

Stan says: “I don’t know that I got much time left, kiddo. So I just want you to know: none of this is your fault. Don’t beat yourself up over other people’s mistakes. And, also, you turn out great. Your sister sends me updates. I’m real proud of you. I always will be.”

“Grunkle Stan…” And then Dipper thinks,  _what the hell_ , and he’s surging forward, throwing his arms around Stan’s shoulders, burying his head against a wrinkled neck. His eyes burn and his breath catches in his chest and he has no words, no clever thing to say. Just a breaking heart and the feel of strong hands, coming up to wrap around his shoulders. Even then, he can tell it’s fleeting. Because Stan is there but he’s also… fragile, in a way Dipper can’t explain. A three dimensional thing made half a dimension short, not quite as substantial as he seems.

And then a voice says:

“Sorry to interrupt this touching family moment, but we’d like to bring you a word from our sponsor, Chekhov’s Cloning Contrivances. Chekhov’s, the leading supplier in human cloning. As seen previous in dialog by me, Bill Cipher. Mentioning cloning. Of humans. Human cloning, a thing that exists. In case anyone forgot. In the fifteen minutes it’s been since it was mentioned. Human. Cloning. Find your new body, today!”

Dipper’s eyes go suddenly very wide. When he looks, he sees Stan’s have done the same.

“Uh,” says Dipper.

“Or tomorrow!” Bill adds, voice speeding up. “Definitely tomorrow. Because, uh, Dipper can I talk to you for a second? Over here. One second, maybe twenty. Just quickly. Now. Right now. Important. Talk to Bill. Yes. Quickly. Do it.”

Bill never calls Dipper “Dipper”. That, more than anything, convinces him to step back, away from Stan. To turn, or half turn, which is all he gets time for before Bill’s hands are twined in Dipper’s jacket, are pulling him across the floor, to where Bill is floating on the far side of the room. Bill might have weird little boneless noodle arms, but he is  _strong_. Dipper’s halfway through a yelp of protest when he’s suddenly eyes-to-eye with Bill, who’s saying:

“I need a favor. Two favors. Well. You need a favor, I need a favor. So. Two favors. Now. Right now. Chop chop.”

“Whoa. Bill, wait. What—?”

“Get ‘em outta here. Get ‘em outta here right now, even the old man. That’s your favor. My favor? I need your body. A body. But yours. Yours is easiest. On loan. Just for a bit. Body. Yours.”

“Wait, Bill. Slow down, I—”

“Too late for slow. We’ve done slow. I let you have slow. This is fast now. Chop chop chop. Body. Now. Go. Fast. Or we all die. Everything dies. Not kidding. Dies.”

Dipper opens his mouth. He wants to ask  _what the hell, Bill?_  and  _what are you talking about?_. He wants to protest, to think, to second-guess. Because it’s such a contrivance, isn’t it? Dipper’s big emotional moment, his vulnerability, shattered by a sudden urgency. And maybe it really is urgent, and maybe it isn’t. Maybe Bill’s planned this, maybe this was his endgame all along. Freed from the bell, returned to his power. Dipper had thought that was enough but maybe, just maybe, he was wrong. Maybe Bill’s going for the trifecta; freedom, power, Dipper’s body. Maybe.

Or maybe… maybe he really is panicking. Maybe he really has given them as long as he could, maybe there’s something else. Something going down, something Dipper’s forgotten. Something urgent. And Dipper thinks he could run a thousand scenarios, second- and third- and tenth- and twentieth-guess. Sift his memory, check the foreshadowing, try and find a clue, any clue, to Bill’s motives.

He could do all that, he thinks, and it would still come down to one single question.

How much does he trust Bill?

And Dipper thinks:

_Oh, fuck._

And he says:

“Sure. Okay.”

Bill’s eye widens, big and round, for one instant. Then he… Dipper doesn’t want to say “relaxes”, because Bill is a geometric shape. But that’s the impression Dipper gets.

And Bill says: “I love you.”

And then Dipper feels like he’s hit by a freight train.

“Dipper!”

It’s different than before. Before, it’d felt like being knocked over, being bodychecked on a busy street. This isn’t that. This feels like jamming two feet into the one sock, two hands into the one glove, ten dimensions into three.

He stumbles backwards, arms and legs pinwheeling like he’s forgotten what they are. Like he hasn’t had them his entire life, which he hasn’t, stupid linear meatsacks and their stupid linear meatsack world. Messy and rotting, stagnant and brief. Not like a world should be, as fast as thought and as pure as equations, all things summed to zero in the breath between the quantum and  _oh my God what’s happening?_

The panic hits him, magnifying his own fear into the stars. He hasn’t done this, not like this, first time for everything but there’s no time and he’s so jumbled, all mixed up. His body and he didn’t want to throw Pine Tree out, not this time, not after such an easy acquiescence, such aching trust, and he’s never done this not sure if it’ll work but he has to try, and if there’s anyone he wants to try with it’s himself, heart hammering and so afraid, wanting to trust and terrified of betrayal, and—

“Dipper! Dipper!”

—someone is shaking him. His shooting star, voice terrified, but for the wrong thing. And he needs to tell her, to say he’s okay, that she should run. And what comes out is a garbled mess but he looks at her, and she must know something isn’t right, because her eyes go very wide and she says:

“Bipper!”

And he says:

“Yneos.” And then, because that wasn’t right either: “Yes. No. Bipper-Dipper. It’s both of us this is weird. Oh, man this wasn’t you need to run.”

Mabel says: “What?”

She needs to run. To get out. She’s in danger if she stays, and it’s that though that does the deed, cleaving even as it unites.

“Mabel. Mabel, listen to me. You need to run. Take Pacifica, and Grunkle Stan, and  _get out_.” He needs to convince Mabel but he needs to get to the console, too. He lunges towards the latter even as he’s still talking to the former, his body not in sync, thirteen dimensions stuffed into the three inside his head.

“Dipper!” Mabel says. “Dipper, what happened? What… did Bill—?”

“It’s fine,” Dipper says, because it is. Or rather, it isn’t, and he terrified, and the world is ending—his world, the whole world, he doesn’t know and doesn’t even care about the difference—but this one thing? This one thing is okay. Too much stuffed inside his head, and he can see, now, why he’s been thrown out before. Before, but not now, because Bill’s pressed against the walls, hunched over and awkward but he’s leaving as much space as he can, a place for Dipper inside of his own mind. “We’re fine,” Dipper says, even as his hands fly across the console. Hitting sigils, punching buttons. “But, Mabel. Mabel, you need to run. Something’s coming. We need to shut it down. I know— Bill knows how. But there’s no time. If we’re wrong, if we’re too slow… Mabel, you have to get out. Get the others to Pine Tree! Eyes front I need to see what I’m doing here!”

Dipper hadn’t even noticed he’d looked to the side, looked to Mabel. But Bill is right, they need to look at the console.

“What’s coming?” Mabel says. “Dipper? Di— Bill! Bill, so help me. I’m not leaving without my brother!”

His head turns, eyes focused right on his sister. Whatever she sees there, she takes a step back. “Get out!” Bill says. Dipper’s voice, but Bill’s inflection. “If I’m too slow, I can hide your brother. I can’t hide the rest of you.”

This is fear, Dipper thinks. Atavistic terror. He isn’t sure what it’s for, exactly, only that it’s Bill who feels it. Something’s coming, something worse than death. Something they have to stop. Stop, or die trying.

He keeps Mabel’s gaze for one long moment, even if it’s not really him she’s looking at. It’s Bill. Dipper’s eyes, but Bill’s sight.

Mabel says: “Okay. Okay. Dipper… Dipper must trust you. I…” Then her arms are around his shoulders, her face pressing into his neck. “Keep him safe. Please?”

“Deal,” says Bill.

“Okay. Pacifica, Grunkle Stan? Time to run!” And she’s pulling away, and Bill is turning their head back to the console. It’s a sequence, he knows it. He  _invented_  this, recycled a dozen times, regurgitated in this bastardized form by Gideon and whomever Gideon employed to make this monstrosity of an interface. Things are so much easier, where he’s from. Reality is so much closer, no buttons or sigils or commands. Just thought, just thought and will and it occurs to Dipper this is Bill. He’s thinking Bill’s thoughts, filtered through his own brain. Because of course he is, this is how it works, Pine Tree, and don’t give me that you didn’t realize it would be like this either you’ve never done it before I couldn’t kick you out if this goes wrong then there’s nowhere you can go, nowhere I can hide, maybe this is how it was always going to be I don’t understand what you should pray you never do, pray to whatever invisible monster you pray to what is it what’s coming what are you so afraid of the end of the world you think it’s going to be brimstone and fire and death but it isn’t. It’s  _consumption_.

Dimly, Dipper’s aware of the sound of the blast doors, slamming shut behind him. Then he’s alone, in the way that isn’t, while ahead of him a machine bores a hole through the walls between the worlds.

There’s something behind that wall. This is the secret, the plot he’s always known. A pinhole in the universe, a hair pushed through the Eye. Supposedly a herald, but cut off from the scalp for so long. And who could blame him if he didn’t want to return? A god in this world, a slave in the last, just a pinhole standing between the two. And he’s tried to keep it closed. So long he’s tried, generations of mindless protein globs thwarting him in this one most simple thing. And every time they do, the pinhole tears. A gap, a crack, a gash. And next time? Next time, a hair won’t be the only thing that gets sent through.

“Do you see, now?” Bill says. “This world is  _mine_. I’m not giving it back.”

There are a lot of dumb things Dipper doesn’t say.  _I’m sorry_  and  _I didn’t know_. Doesn’t say them because Bill already knows. They’re so close, breathing each others’ mental air. Maybe there’s nothing left to say.

Bill’s hand slams down on the final sigil in the sequence. Somewhere, deep below, the ground begins to shake. In front of them, Dipper sees the light of the portal contract, down to a pinpoint like an old fashioned TV. Contract, then burst open once again. And this time? This time, something comes through.

“We’re too late.” Dipper isn’t sure whether he says it, or Bill, or whether it even matters.  _Something_  is coming through the portal. Something cast in ten dimensions, inhuman, blooming like a fractal, running along steel and concrete.

Dipper says: “What… what  _is_  that?”

He feels Bill swallow, feels the lick of his own tongue against his lips. His mind is a confused jumble, so alien he can’t fathom what it is he’s seeing. And then Bill says:

“That? That’s the rest of me.”

And the Body of Bill Cipher explodes into the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I admit I've discovered my new vice: [pop Eminem mashups](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s8-esX9DgI). u_u


	12. ??? ???

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to apologise to the entire STEM field for my misuse of mathematical concepts.
> 
> I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry.

It’s an obscenity in pure mathematics. In colors Dipper’s eyes can’t see, shapes his mind can’t process. A triangle exploding into a star into a fractal, an infection of reality, decrypting matter from the outside in. The metal of the portal screams as the infection’s bulk splits it open, electricity sparking even as the power cuts. It’s too little too late, the hole is bored, won’t close even if the drill’s turned off. And now beyond is flooding through.

It’s the singing that’s the worst part. A screeching jangle of inhuman disharmony. Dipper can’t hear it, but Bill can, and it  _hurts_  him. Hurts like the return to gravity hurts an astronaut, because Bill is a piece of the spreading outside, its rebellious Herald. It wants him back, and a part of Bill wants to go, because Bill is  _made_  to go, made to be reabsorbed into the Bulk.

Dipper has a memory of it, or rather Bill has a memory of it. Of a living infinity of pure will, comprehending every corner of its own existence, every fractured piece moving, unified, probing and hunting for worlds within the multiverse. And the shells are so tough, no easy way to pierce the brane. But every wall has its cracks, and this is how it works. Injecting a tiny piece inside, one piece that can grow, can spread, can burst open the world from the pressure, can reunite with the Bulk in an orgy of devouring consumption.

That consumption looks like a nightmare funhouse mirror. Everything the Bulk touches splitting and multiplying, steel and concrete and the very air itself. Dipper can feel the hum of unravelling strings, and this is it, he realizes, this is the quantum. The macro manifestation of every equation in weird physics, M-theory proof sitting right here in front of him, spreading outwards from one single glowing Eye.

Too late, Dipper sees the Bulk’s spread meet the unconscious body of Gideon Gleeful.

“Shit!” The console room door is open, and Dipper lunges towards it. The first attempt nearly sees him faceplant on the concrete, his limbs half-paralyzed by Bill’s fear. “Bill! Move it!”

Bill does, but so does Gideon, jerking as soon as the Bulk Behind All Things touches on a lifeless limb. It tears him like it tears everything, the bile rising in Dipper’s throat as Gideon’s body swells and bloats, cells blooming and multiplying, skin stretching and expanding, patterns repeating over and over and over. Eyes within eyes, fingers upon fingers. The Bulk-touched Gideon lurches upright, mouths opening for a scream that echoes through the silver-grey darkness of the edge of what is real.

It’s awful, and Dipper wants to look away, even as he can’t. He is suddenly, profoundly grateful the same thing doesn’t happen to him when Bill inhabits  _his_  body.

“Why do you think I stay on the other side of the Mindscape?” Bill mutters. “Trial and error.” As he says it, a nebula of knowledge blooms inside their shared mind. And Dipper  _understands_. He understands everything, about Bill, about the Mindscape, about the Bulk. It’s too much, all of it. Literally too much for his meatsack brain to hold but, right now, his mind is its own pinhole, a peering glimpse into the quantum consciousness behind Bill’s puppet facade.

And isn’t that the kicker? They aren’t dealing with demons or monsters. Just quantum, living mathematics. And math? Math is something Dipper can do.

“I know how to close the hole,” Dipper says, because he does. Or, rather, he knows the theory, and he’s betting Bill can do the execution. No, he  _knows_  Bill can, because Bill knows Bill can. “But we need to get close.” The door to the portal room is open, and Bulk-Gideon is howling around in there, flopping back and forth like a Cyriakian YouTube nightmare.

“Okay,” Bill says, and Dipper has a mental image, of himself, standing in front of Bill’s triangle-shape. “Don’t be weird about this later,” Bill adds. Which is exactly as much warning as Dipper gets before Bill’s eye closes. Closes, and then opens. But this time, the lashes are pointing inward like teeth, Bill’s pupil replaced by an endless yawning void.

Then that mouth descends over Dipper, and his consciousness falls into the void.

* * *

He wanted to know what Bill looked like. Now he does, from the inside, and it’s nothing he can put into words. Humans don’t have words for what Bill is, only mathematics, difficult and strange. 

Bill is beautiful.

He’s also everywhere, unfolding in all dimensions, pulled tight around the fragile glimmer of Dipper’s consciousness. It should be smothering, confining, terrifying. And it is, in its own way. But it’s also comforting. A warm blanket against a frozen wind, a diving bell within an ocean. Dipper curls deeper into the embrace, feeling the spinfoam contort around him, a hendecaxennon fractal, repeating to infinity. Comforting in its strangeness, so very far removed from any mortal pain or angst and Dipper knows he could get lost here. Swallowed whole and kept forever, until his human life and human mind are stripped away, nothing left but an endless dreaming quantum.

He could get lost. But won’t. If he does, there’s not going to be anything left to get lost  _in_.

Somewhere, very dimly, Dipper is aware of cold concrete against his forehead. Of the rancid meaty stink of bloating flesh, of the spark and burn of wires. A tiny pinhole of light, leading back into his human shell. It is, he realizes, as much of a window as Bill dares allow.  _I can hide your brother,_  Bill said. This is what he meant.

They’re prostrate on the floor in the portal room, the Bulk standing before them, screaming through Gideon’s nightmare mouths. A broken parody of language from an entity with no need of it. Dipper understands the meaning, because Bill understands it; a demand that he abandon his meat-puppet, abandon hiding behind the Mindscape’s veil. Rejoin himself in the Bulk, to participate in the Great Unravelling.

“We are premature in Our celebration,” Bill is saying, with Dipper’s voice. “The Eye is still small. As We know, it cannot be enlarged from outside.”

Bulk-Gideon gibbers and howls, fractals cracking the concrete of the walls. As they do, sigils flare to life, burning cold blue even in the colorless void of the broken-open Mindscape.

“This was a trap,” Bill says. “We did not realize until too late. The Eye has been calibrated to allow only a flow of Our presence that can be contained within this room.”

On this side, Bill’s own fractals are spinning so loud and fast they’d be giving Dipper a headache, if he currently had one to ache. It’s fear, Dipper knows. Fear of what he’s doing, fear of failing. He’s trying to lie to an entity with no concept of it, no concept of anything other than the endless propagation of the Self. Bill fears that, if he fails, if he can’t make the Bulk comprehend what he’s saying, let alone believe it, then he’ll be lost. Reabsorbed, dissolved. Bye bye Bill Cipher, and even being this close is dangerous. He can already feel his equations reshaping, unravelling the tweaks he’s made while stuck in this three-dimensional backwater. Bill can feel it, so Dipper can feel it, and he can  _see_  it, too; the form around him becoming more and more like the pollution in the portal room.

Dipper grabs on. Or imagines it’s what he’s doing, pulling Bill against him, eyes to golden eye as Dipper says: “You’re Bill Cipher. You’re Bill Cipher and I love you and you’re  _mine_ , it can’t have you. I won’t let it.” A mantra, and he repeats it over and over even as he dredges his own memory for flashes of Bill. Of their first meeting, or their second first meeting, of sitting on the ridge above Gravity Falls, of fucking and of making love. Even if Bill can’t remember who he is, Dipper thinks, Dipper can do it for him. Good memories and bad, filthy flesh and clean gold lines.

Outside, in the portal room, Bill says, “We can enlarge the Eye on Our behalf. But this mortal shell needs access to do so. We must allow its passage, untouched.”

There’s a moment, long and awful, the Bulk-Gideon drooling and oozing. And then it falls aside, a puppet with cut strings, and the Bulk clears a way.

Dipper’s heart is hammering and his palms sweat and Bill hates experiencing the physicality of it even as he prays the Bulk doesn’t notice or care about what it’s seeing. No human could mistake their ruse, Bill’s too frightened, his body language to imprecise. The Bulk isn’t human, but it was in Gideon, even if Gideon wasn’t. If he had been? If he had been, Bill knows they’d have had no chance. Even now, Bill doesn’t know what, if any, residual experiences the Bulk absorbed from the body.

He walks Dipper’s body to the portal. The Bulk still oozes through, but retreats back as Bill passes. The damage left in its wake remains, huge fractal-scored gouges in steel and concrete, sparking wires and arching electricity. It’s dangerous for them to be here. Dipper is such a fragile fleshy little sack and, this time, Bill doesn’t want to damage what he’s been loaned.

And then they’re there, standing at the base of the portal, of the rift in the universe’s brane. The fragile shell that separates everything Dipper’s ever known from the unfathomable oblivion of the Bulk.

 _Okay,_  Dipper thinks.  _We can do this._

It’s a combined effort. Bill can sense the equations, can manipulate the raw variables of the world. But it’s Dipper who knows the transformations, knows the theories. There’s a hole in the universe, but Bill is a cipher and Dipper a cryptographer. They both know a little bit about obfuscating truths.

Dipper does the thinking, Bill does the work. It’s easy once Dipper starts conceptualizing the D-brane as a cryptogram, the hole a chunk of plaintext. To fix it, they need to re-encrypt. One of Bill’s unsubtle metaphors, but it’ll do, once Dipper’s worked out the key distribution. So he choses a variant on BB84 because what the hey, he wrote a paper on it last term. He’s not sure his professor ever imagined any of her students using the protocol for patching holes in reality, but Dipper’s sure that she’d approve.

Also, if the Bulk manages to break it, Bill will know. The magic of QKD.

Bill’s hands—Dipper’s hands, driven by Bill—burn so brightly Dipper wonders if he’s going to end up with scars. Strange shapes hang in the air, unravelled strings and displaced foam, the subatomic not so much writ large as focused and projected up and up and into something Dipper’s eyes can process. Kets seem clunky by comparison, and Dipper wonders, if he’s very, very good, if Bill will teach him what he knows. Later, when they get out of this. Because they will. They’ll get out, the Bulk won’t, and there’ll still be a world to wake up to tomorrow.

Line ‘em up, knock ‘em down. One last thing to do, the equivalent of pressing the go button, of starting the patch. They both know that, the second they do, the Bulk will realize what they’ve done. It’s not paying much attention to this part of the process—not expecting a betrayal, incapable of expecting one—but when the qubits fall the hole will slam shut like a pupil in a spotlight. The parts of the Bulk already here will remain, but Gideon’s wards should hold, at least until Bill gets a chance to come back and redo them. Then Dipper will get Pacifica to encase this entire thing in a twenty foot thick steel-reinforced block and, if possible, drop it to the bottom of the ocean.

 _When we do this,_  Dipper thinks,  _you have to be ready to run._

Bill is. Is practically half-turned by the time he does the deed. One final flash of blue, and the burning white hole in front of them flickers. As it does, the Bulk screams.

“Go go go go go!” Bill says, mostly to himself, as fractals explode on all sides. There’s a rumble, a feeling like the air is tearing into ten, and Dipper’s whole body bursts into cold blue fire. The fire is its own kind of fractal, Bill’s fractal, and it’s nothing on the power of the Bulk, but it’s all he has. All he has to protect Dipper’s fragile mortal shell from turning into another Gideon. It’s hard to see, the Bulk roars and his eyes don’t like the chaos, so he’s stumbling half-blind across rubble and wreckage, bolting for the still-opened door. If they don’t get out, they die. Both of them. Bill has Dipper behind the Mindscape but if the Bulk can get Dipper’s body then it can tear that, too. No more hiding, no more tricks, no more second chances. Just one door, and the grotesque, seething mess that used to be Gideon, pulling itself across the floor to block it.

Bill roars, a decade of payback rising in his throat, and when a once-arm flails for his leg he kicks it, hard. Blue flame explodes against its skin, then flickers to nothing, extinguished and absorbed. Bill doesn’t stick around to watch, is too busy leaping up Gideon’s side, his hands grabbing flesh and limbs and less identifiable things, the same mad scramble he’s perfected from a hundred trips up his lookout trail. This time, the ground fights back, but Bill punches a fist elbow-deep into a multi-lobed eye, popping it with a wet gush and a roaring earthquake in the flesh beneath him. He doesn’t stick around to see whether it’s a laugh or if it’s pain, just vaults over a mass of hair and teeth, and then he’s over the crest.

Coming down Bulk Mountain is easier than going up. Down is just a slide, sweat and skin oil slicking his progress. When his feet hit concrete, he vows to throw Dipper’s body in the shower for the next month at least.

Two more strides, and he’ll be out the door. He gets to one and a half.

It’s the half-stride that kills him, a hand made of hands made of hands lashing out, grabbing onto his ankle and  _pulling_. He goes down, hard, falling halfway out the door, cracking his head on the floor beyond. It’s agony, and he laughs, but the world slips out of focus as he does. Just for a half second, but a half-second is all it takes, the fire on his skin flickering out long enough for Dipper’s body to touch the Bulk.

 _This_  is agony. Bill’s entire body lurches, his entire  _everything_  lurches, on both sides of the Mindscape, and for a moment he loses his hold on Dipper’s consciousness. Dipper has a the sense of falling, a hypnic jerk without the waking. The jolt sends him out of Bill’s head—Bill’s head in Dipper’s head in Bill’s head—out of what’s happening in the portal room. For one horrible second, the whirling fractals around him stop, go dark, and Dipper is alone in an endless void.

Then they start again, coldfire blue and burnished gold, and the sensation of falling stops, the sensation of Bill returns. He’s aware that Bill is screaming with Dipper’s lungs, that one of his legs has stopped working, that it feels like someone’s run a logging truck over a quarter of his body. Then there’s the sound of a slamming door, and the world rushes back up to meet him.

* * *

It  _hurts_. A lot. Bill is saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” over and over and over again and it’s so un-Bill that Dipper has to laugh. His leg won’t work, or it will work, but it works wrong, which is also exactly how the flesh looks beneath the fabric of his jeans. Lumpy and strange, the sensation extending up his hip and into his stomach.

Behind him, Dipper hears the Bulk scream, feels the  _thud-thud-thud_  of the Gideon-thing hammering on the glass. His vision isn’t focusing, but when he looks back, he sees the light in the portal flicker down to a point. Sees the trapped fragments of the Bulk writhe and try and spread, even as the walls around them glow with the wards that hold them back. Dipper has a strange, detached sense of wondering; if they stay cut off long enough, if they’ll develop into more entities like Bill. And whether they’ll be friend or foe if they do.

“We did it,” he says, his voice breathy and pained.

“Yeah,” says Bill. “Yeah.”

“We have to get… to get…”

“Yeah.”

Dipper isn’t bleeding, and he supposes that’s something. Walking is difficult, his leg trailing useless, every wall-assisted hop accompanied by a lance of pain that seems to split him up the center. It takes him too long to find the mechanism that opens the console room doors, then too long for those to part. He’s not sure how much time he’s got. His eyes won’t focus and the world feels both very far and very white. His head is still stuffed with Bill, and Bill is calling his name, over and over. Dipper smiles. He likes the sound of his name in Bill’s voice. He wants to hear more of it. He wants Bill not to sound so sad while he says it.

The corridor is impossibly long. Dipper takes it as quickly as he can, which isn’t very, and it occurs to him there might be something wrong with his insides. If whatever happened to his leg got into his abdomen, got into his organs, then he might be screwed whether there’s blood loss or not. Dipper doesn’t know much about biology, but he’s pretty sure no human ever survived with a fractal kidney.

When he gets to the ladder, he realizes it’s over. Even the lowest rung seems impossibly high, his arms shake and his fingers won’t grasp. He collapses on the concrete, head lolling back.

“Nearly… nearly there,” he says. “At least… at least…”  _we saved the world_  dies on his lips, because the world is fading a white that’s really black, and that’s all she wrote, folks. Dipper tried, he really did, but the Bulk got him good. One last parting gift. He supposes that, if he has to die here, at least he doesn’t die alone.

“B-Bill?” he says, his own voice very quiet and very far. “Bill?”

But no-one answers, and Dipper’s last realization is that he’s by himself inside his head.

And then everything goes dark.

* * *

In the middle of the forest, he comes to a clearing. He’s pretty sure there use to be a tree here. He’s pretty sure he remembers it burning. There’s nothing, now, not even ash and charcoal. He’s pretty sure there should be. There should be someone waiting.

“Hello?” he calls.

There’s no answer, but when he looks down, he sees he’s holding a pine cone. The triangular scales make a swirling fractal, and he runs his fingers across the pattern, a smile curving on his lips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbgpjqNN2Vs)


	13. Day 0

It takes him a while to realize he's dreaming.

The hospital is so lifeless anyway, bleached and grey, that it’s only the white LEDs on the monitors that clue him in.

He’s hooked up to a lot of monitors.

He’s hooked up to a lot of monitors, lying on his back, sluggish exhaustion pressing down on his limbs even in the Mindscape. He can just about manage to turn his head, which he does, and stares at the slumped shape sitting by his bedside for a long time before his brain registers that it’s Grunkle Stan. He’s gray and still, eyes downcast but not asleep, and Dipper realizes it must be because he’s really there. No mind ghost, no memory. But an actual for-real flesh-and-blood Grunkle, sitting watch by Dipper's hospital bed.

When he tries to use it, Dipper’s voice feels raw and broken. Like he’s had something shoved down his throat for the last week. “How long was I out?” he asks, to no-one in particular.

The room has a window, and Dipper can see beyond Stan’s shoulder to the night outside. There’s a field of glittering stars, but no moon.

“Few days.” The light in the room is suddenly a lot more golden, and Dipper exhales, big and rough and painful.

Bill is floating over the end of his bed. He has the index fingers of his hands extended, and is poking them together, over and over. Like he’s nervous. Dipper isn’t sure why he would be. Bill's not the one in the hospital bed.

It occurs to Dipper, as he thinks this, that the shape under his blanket isn’t right. That the shadows cast by Bill’s light aren’t what Dipper would expect, given what he assumes of his body is lying there.

Bill says:

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t… it…”

“You weren’t there,” Dipper says. “I remember… I got to the ladder. And you weren’t there.”

Bill laughs, but it’s nervous. “I was talking to your sister,” he says. “You know she tried to do a deal to save your life? Said I could have whatever I wanted in return. Had to tell her it doesn’t work like that, I’m really not— Anyway, no could do. Told her she should call the ambulance, instead. Cell phone reception is terrible in this town, you know that? Good thing the mill has a landline. Had a landline. Now I don’t think it has—”

“What… The damage…?” Dipper doesn’t want to ask, but does anyway.

“Well,” Bill’s eye keeps looking everywhere but Dipper, his hands still fidgeting. It’s an oddly human gesture, given what Dipper now knows of Bill. He wonders how long it took Bill to learn how to use body language to convey emotions. How long it took Bill to  _have_  emotions. “They took the leg,” Bill says. “It was… Unless you were big on having legs on your leg, it was a mess. I think it’s in a jar somewhere downstairs, SUDDEN ONSET TERATOMA. You’ll be the inspiration for a generation of medical students! Leg and a kidney. Bit of bowel. I never really understoof about how many  _organs_  you meatsacks have. All squished up inside, it’s so weird. The doctors were very good. Lots of shouting and cutting and blood. Very exciting! I watched them. Oh! You have a very attractive liver, I think you should know that. Very smooth and shiny-looking. I asked a nurse if I could touch it but he started screaming so I decided that was a no, and anyway, I watched all the stuff they took out, and I know where it all is, and I offered to get it back but your sister says it doesn’t work that way and—”

“Bill.” Dipper’s pretty sure he’s going to wake up with a headache. “Bill. Bill! Just… shut up. Please, shut up.”

“Oh.” Then it’s back to nothing but the little  _pfat-pfat-pfat_  of Bill’s fingers. Even the hospital machines don't beep.

“I…” Dipper starts. Stops. Then says, “I need a hug.”

“Okay.”

A pause. Then, “From you, Bill.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Dipper feels the touch on his shoulder, a light and shifting pressure through the thin veil of the Mindscape. He closes his eyes, sighs, leans into the sensation. Feels more of it wrap around him. Behind his eyes, he can see the endless dance of Bill’s fractal, the spinning infinity beyond the world.

“I’m really tired,” Dipper says.

“You’re asleep,” Bill points out.

“If I fall asleep in my sleep do I end up in the Mindscape’s Mindscape?”

“No, but I like how you think. Let me work on it.”

“Bill?”

“Yeah?” Bill’s voice is much closer. Dipper is pretty sure he can feel small black fingers in his hair.

“You’re really beautiful. Even if you don’t have a liver. And this isn’t your fault.”

If Bill answers, Dipper doesn’t remember it. He does feel the presence around him draw closer, illusions of hospitals and beds fading, until it’s just the two of them, holding and being held floating in the quantum.

And then nothing.

* * *

And then:

"He's waking up."

Beeping monitors and flurried movement. The blinding glare of the afternoon sun, the smell of old man and young woman. The sound of his name, the feel of tears on his skin. He hurts. Everywhere, but especially his leg. The one he no longer has. The first time he sees the stump, he cries. Everything from the mid-thigh down is gone, and there are big ugly gashes and torn-out chunks of flesh running up his side. Staples and stitches and bruises, all overlaid across something like a pale scar. A pattern of colorless skin that curls in angry fractals across his belly and underneath his arm and across his lower back. The pattern isn’t quite the Bulk’s and isn’t quite Bill’s, and even though Mabel assures him it’s beautiful, Dipper isn’t sure.

She wasn’t there, in the portal room. She didn’t  _see_.

He tells her what happened, because she’s his sister and of course he does. Even if she’s already heard most of the story from Bill, being cooperative for once. Bill and Mabel and Stan have already re-set the wards on the bunker, Pacifica is in the process of filling in the entry with solid concrete.

The official story is that Gideon was running an illegal lab experimenting with human cloning. The fact that Stan tells Dipper this is so bleakly ironic that Dipper laughs until he coughs blood.

“What…” Stan starts, then winces. “In that room, behind the glass…?”

“Best not to think about it,” Dipper says.

“They’re ruling it a massive teratoma.” Stan enunciates the word like he’s still not sure what it means. “By-product of bad experiments.”

“That’s good enough.” Dipper thinks of his own now-severed leg. He’s silently glad he never thought to see it.

“Is it… alive?”

Dipper shrugs. “It’s not Gideon,” he says. “If that’s what you’re asking. Bill says Gideon's lost somewhere in his ‘ironic hell’. He hasn’t found your door yet.” They don’t know where the other Gideon is; he’d been gone from the Manor by the time Pacifica got back. Bill is, to excuse the pun, keeping an eye out.

Stan looks away. He’s older than Dipper remembers, which fits, given it’s been a decade. Cloned from a single hair Mabel found inside his fez. They could’ve made him younger, could’ve made him any age, near as Dipper can tell. But he’d refused.  _I’ve cheated a lot of thing in my life, kiddo,_  he’d told Mabel.  _This ain’t gonna be one of them._

Still, if Mabel slipped in a few changes—a reduced risk of heart attack, of stroke, of cancer—then Stan never has to know. And if he’s fit for his age? Then an active rural lifestyle does wonders.

Stan clears his throat. “Dipper,” he says, “about Bill Cipher…”

“He’s my boyfriend,” Dipper says. It’s still weird to think about it in such mundane terms, but there it is. “If you’ve got a problem with me being gay—”

“Kid, why would I have a problem with  _that_?” Stan sounds honestly baffled. “I don’t have a problem with that. I’ve got a problem with Bill Cipher.  _Everyone_  has a problem with Bill Cipher.”

“Not me,” says Dipper. He doesn’t feel like launching an in-depth defense of Bill’s positive attributes. Not today, not with his body aching and exhausted from the physical therapy. It’s grueling and awful and he hates it, hates the pain and the awkwardness and the frustration. He doesn’t hate the way Bill sits in his mind while he endures it, quiet and patient and  _there_. Dipper’s pretty sure Bill would do the whole thing for him, laughing all the while, if Dipper wanted to chill and watch TV as an incorporeal mind-ghost instead. Because Dipper’s pretty sure, he never asks.

Stan sighs. “Well,” he says. “You can’t blame an old man for worrying.”

“Grunkle Stan,” Dipper says, “I… I’ve been thinking.”

“Uh-oh.”

Dipper smirks at the tone. “I’m… When this is over, I’m thinking of not going back to Berkeley.”

“Oh?”

“I… I mean, if you…” Dipper swallows, looks down to where his fingers fidget with the rough hospital blanket. “I’d like to stay here, in Gravity Falls.”

Mr. and Ms. Valentino were surprisingly accommodating, when Mabel turned up on their doorstep with the very-much-not-dead Stanley Pines. Gideon and his “illegal cloning lab” got the blame for that one, too. The official line is that Stan found out, and faked his own death to escape Gideon’s hitmen. After what was discovered beneath the mill, no-one spent too much effort questioning the timeline. Especially no with the Valentinos being quite insistent that, no, they’d never received a body, of course not. And if extra ash came out of the crematorium that week? Well. Who was counting?

Dipper adds: “It’s just, Bill says there are a lot more holes like the one Gideon made. Not as big, but… But the Bulk will be looking for them, now. He thinks it’ll try and send more Heralds through. We can close those holes when we find them, and…” Dipper sighs. “And a lot of them are Ford’s fault. He wasn’t always… I mean, you know Ford.”

“I do,” says Stan. There’s a lot in those two words. Dipper doesn’t look at any of it too closely. A problem for another time.

“Anyway,” he says. “I think I should stay here. I can still get my PhD, I still want to get it”—if only so he can insist Mabel calls him  _Doctor_  Dipper until they die—“but there’s no hurry. With the other stuff, there… there might be.” His fingers twist in the hospital blanket as his mind flashes back to the sound reality makes as it’s burst open like rotting fruit. “Anyway. I can get a place in town, but—”

“Don’t be stupid,” Stan says. “Of course you’re welcome to stay at the Shack. You’re always welcome.”

When Dipper looks, Stan is doing his best to project irritation and failing miserably.

“Thanks, Grunkle Stan,” Dipper says. “I appreciate it.”

“Yeah, well. Just tell your damn triangle to stay out of my head.”

Dipper laughs. “Deal,” he says.

* * *

He's released from hospital within the week. Bundled into Stan's old car, with wheelchair and crutches and appointments for PT and with the prosthetist. Dipper is aware that, as with Stan, he could simply get a new body. Maybe, he thinks, he still will. Maybe. But…

The scars are his scars, the missing limb his missing limb. They’re reminders, grim trophies from the time the world didn’t end. Consequences from the actions that almost let it. Dipper figures it’s like Stan and his aging. They all know they could cheat mortality, could become things neither more nor less than human, simply different. They know and, for now, they don’t.

When they get there, there’s a banner hanging over the sign for the Mystery Shack. This one says WELCOME HOME DIPPER! in giant, sparkling letters.

Mabel is waiting on the porch, holding a plate with two cupcakes she foists into Dipper’s lap. “Welcome home!” she announces, bright and manic. “Don’t worry ‘bout your stuff, we got it! You’re in the room down the hall, first floor, not the attic. It’s all ready. You should go check it out. You’ll like it I swear! Anyway, me and Stan are going into town now. Okay, bye! You have fun, we love you! See you tonight!”

“Mabel!” Dipper isn’t sure whether to laugh or be alarmed. “Mabel, wait!”

But she’s already jumping into the car, waving brightly even as Stan guns it out of the drive. And Dipper, left on the porch, confused and holding cupcakes.

He’s still useless with the wheelchair, and leaves at least three dints in Stan’s walls. He feels guilty about it for approximately ten seconds, before irritation sets in. If they’d wanted him not to dint the walls, why run off so fast? Dipper’s not stupid, he’s sure Mabel’s got something planned, and it’s in his room, but… ugh. Getting there is a pain. So is opening the door, the chair leaving more dints in the process.

And then the door is open, and Dipper is busy trying to get his chair through the gap when he looks up and sees a naked man, sitting on his new bed.

“Welcome home, Pine Tree,” says the naked man.

Dipper blinks, then swallows. “Bill?”

Bill grins, showing of sharp little triangular teeth. He stands up, opens his arms, and spins around. "What do you think?" he asks.

"I—"

"Your sister helped me with the details. She's pretty good at this stuff."

Which, okay. Is a slightly weird thought Dipper will examine later. Back when he can speak again.

Bill is amazing, which is a given, and his new body does his reputation justice. He's still got the one eye, still got the teeth. And his skin is still burnished gold and inky black, but this time the effect is natural, not a tattoo, the joins at his shoulders and hips a sort of dapple rather than the angular bricks. It's both so incredibly Bill and, despite its strangeness, so completely human, that it takes Dipper's breath away. 

"Wow," he manages to squeak out, just in case his speechlessness is misconstrued for disapproval. 

"Good wow?" says Bill. He's either arrogantly fishing for compliments, or arrogantly fishing for compliments as a smokescreen to detract from the fact he's legitimately anxious for Dipper's approval. It occurs to Dipper he doesn't care which option is true.

"Good wow," he says, rolling himself into the room. "Very good wow."

Bill comes forward to meet him, the drops to his knees, leaning forward, lips parted, looking for a kiss. Dipper is very eager to give one. They've spent a lot of time together over the last few days, either in Dipper's body or Bill's Mindscape, and they've fooled around a bit in both. Still, Dipper's missed this. Simple human contact, the boundaries between them clear and smooth and firm, the smell of Bill’s skin and the ridiculous softness of his newly cloned lips. His hair is a mop of thick, loose curls in blonde and black, and Dipper wonders if it’s bleach or if Mabel really is some mad genius with designer clone bodies. He can’t stop playing with the hair either way; he always was a sucker for curls.

“Take me to bed,” he says, when he pulls back. This earns him a grin, sharp teeth nipping the soft flesh behind his jaw. Then Bill helps him up, out of the chair and onto the bed. Lying him down and climbing on top, straddling his hips without sitting, without putting any weight on Dipper’s bruises and stitches and the hole where his kidney used to be.

Instead, Bill just poses, showing off lean muscle, running his hands over his own skin. Dipper knows Bill doesn’t especially enjoy his human body, but he does enjoy being the center of attention, and Dipper obliges the latter while getting his fair share of the former. A good quarter of his body aches and the painkillers leave him fuzzy-headed, but he’s getting hard despite both, and thank whatever god is listening that the damage from the Bulk stopped at the inside of his thigh. Dipper likes his dick as much as the next guy, but not enough to suddenly have five of them.

Bill’s new dick, incidentally? A++, excellent work. Dipper’s very enthusiastic to try it out, as soon as he gets the mental image of his sister designing it out of his head.

So he reaches up, Bill reaches down, and they kiss. Dipper’s up on his elbows, and his abdomen is screaming, but it’s… it’s kind of okay. The pain. It’s an I’m-alive-and-I-can-feel sort of pain, and maybe Dipper is starting to see, just a little, what Bill sees in it.

Getting his shirt over his head also hurts, and Dipper wonders if he should invest in more things with buttons. Then he’s not wondering much of anything, not when Bill’s mouth is tracing down his collarbone, his hand running up Dipper’s unhurt side. When Bill gets to a nipple, he bites, just a little, and every hair on Dipper’s body stands on end, his cock full and heavy and pushing against the metal of his zipper.

Bill is working lower, breath tickling against Dipper’s belly, making him laugh. Then a warm tongue is lapping just above the waistband of his jeans, long fingers working the button and the fly.

Dipper sighs as his cock is freed, bouncing up against his abdomen. He lifts his ass, and his jeans are sliding down his legs, being thrown to the floor with a heavy thud.

When Bill returns, he lays on the bed, on Dipper’s uninjured side, his fingers trading lazy, ticklish patterns across the soft flesh above Dipper’s hip.

“You know,” he says, “I’ve never fucked in this body before.”

Dipper snorts laughter. “I should hope not.”

Bill just grins, shifting his hips to rut against Dipper’s uninjured thigh. He’s being unusually careful, but it occurs to Dipper Bill’s been in his body enough to know exactly what hurts and where and why and how much. He’s experienced Dipper’s perception of pain, not just his own. He’s experienced Dipper’s perceptions of a lot of things. Funny, Bill had been so frightened that exposure to the Bulk would change him. He hadn’t seem to care that exposure to Dipper might do the same.

“It’s strange,” Bill says, eye bright and focused. “Not knowing what you’re thinking.”

“About how the doctor told me no sex for like three months,” Dipper lies. Just a little lie. Not the bit about three months, that bit’s true.

Bill snorts. “What would she know?”

“Exactly how much she cut out of my intestine, that’s what she knows.”

“I know that, too!” Bill protests, because god forbid Bill Cipher not be an expert on absolutely everything. Still, his hands drifts lower, low enough to make Dipper’s eyes fall shut with a sigh, so Dipper’s not complaining. “You don’t seem intent on obeying said doctor’s orders,” Bill adds.

“Stupid doctor doesn’t have a hot clone boyfriend,” Dipper mutters, his hips bouncing in time to the stroke of Bill’s fingers. It hurts, just a little, but still feels so, so good. He reaches out with his own hand, running it across a smooth-skinned hip, through the mass of dark curls, to wrap around that pornstar-perfect cock. Bill groans his approval, hips bucking, his hand speeding up. Hie eye slides closed, his flush lips part, pink tongue just touching the inside of his teeth. He is so achingly beautiful, every inch of him, and Dipper is hit with the sudden sharp lash of realization that of course Bill is a walking wet dream, of course he’s  _Dipper’s_  walking wet dream. He was literally designed to be exactly that, and the idea is so strange but so, so fucking hot that Dipper half-rolls onto his side, grabs a handful of Bill’s perfect curls, and decides to really get his money’s worth, as it were. Or, as much as he can with a stomach still full of staples. And, oh, when those come out? He’s gonna make sure Bill can’t sit down for a  _month_. Maybe literally. Bill’s attitude to physical bodies is so weird, maybe Dipper will make a new one and keep it all to himself. Chained naked to his bed, spread open and perfect, unoccupied until he wants it and, fuck. Can Bill possess more than one body at once? He doesn’t, as far as Dipper knows, but can he? Because wouldn’t that just be so fucking perfect, a little orgy of two, a pit of long dark limbs and soft, fuckable lips.

Dipper moans at the thought, warmth and pressure building below his stomach, a spark that flickers in time to Bill’s single perfect hand.

“Mm,” Bill says, breath coming hard. “Whatever  _that_  thought’s about, I like it.”

Dipper laughs. “Oh,” he says. “You will. Gotta… gotta fuck me to sleep, first.” Clones or no clones, they’ll always have the Mindscape.

Bill makes a  _tsk_  sort of sound. “I will gently”—that thing with his fingers that makes Dipper groan—“pleasure”—and again—“you to sleep. Doctor’s orders.” Then he’s moving downwards, kissing and nipping a trail as he does. Over collar and nipple and belly. Until his tongue dances across the damp head of Dipper’s cock. Dipper’s hips jerk, a sharp jolt of pain that’s replaced an instant later by a curl of pleasure as Bill’s mouth opens to take him whole.

It should be worrying, getting sucked off by a guy with a mouth full of shark teeth. It isn’t. It’s  _hot_. Hot and wet and Bill might not be a demon, not really, but who could tell the difference when he’s doing that thing with his tongue? The thing that makes Dipper skin tingle. That turns the spark into a wildfire, a hole burnt straight through the world and into the void beyond, and Dipper jumps, laughing the whole way down.

Before he does, he pulls on Bill’s hair. “Bill,” he says. “Oh, fuck I—”

Bill is not a swallower, his mouth replaced by his hand as Dipper comes in long, thick bursts across his own chest. Pretty far up his own chest, too, and getting left with come drying in the hair above his nipple sets him off, laughing even as the sharp heat of his orgasm fades into a slow warmth. Bill is laughing too, hand stroking his own still-hard cock, face contorted into the mix of horror and amusement he gets whenever forced to deal with the strange realities of meatsack living.

Dipper, on the other hand, has no problem with a bit of extra protein in his diet, as it were, and certainly no problem with full stretch of taking Bill’s fresh-grown dick into his mouth. Bill’s dark-skinned fingers fist his hair, hard enough to hurt, and when he comes, shuddering and breathless, Dipper wonders if the Mindscape does too.

* * *

Afterwards, they cuddle. Wrapped up under the blankets, eating Mabel's cupcakes. One is just a cupcake, dark chocolate cake and bright yellow buttercream decorated by the outline of a constellation Dipper sees in reverse every time he brushes his hair. The other is a cleverly disguised mash of dates and durian cream, because Mabel has apparently decided to take her whole “raw food vegan” thing and run with it. It’s decorated with a triangle of carob, which makes Dipper laugh even as he eats it, much to Bill’s disgust.

“Humans eat jelly babies and gingerbread men and all kinds of things shaped like people,” Dipper says. Judging by his expression, Bill is not convinced. So Dipper asks: “Seriously, why a triangle?”

It’s not like he hasn’t seen Bill, so he gets it. Kinda. Or thinks he does. But he still wants to know Bill’s explanation. He’s not sure whether he’ll get a serious answer or not, but Bill is silent for a moment, and when he speaks, he says:

“If you had to represent a human as a single, two-dimensional shape, what would it be?”

“A rectangle,” Dipper says. “I get that part. But why keep it?”

Bill says: “It was the first thing I understood. Your universe is so… alien. Big and rough and loud. Your world is even worse. For a long time I didn’t… Light, gravity, electromagnetism, I could understand. They were strange, rough manifestations of things I knew. Trees, the sky, air, rocks, atoms… that took longer.” He pauses, eye unfocused, as if he’s remembering something far away and long ago. It occurs to Dipper he doesn’t really know how old Bill is, or even whether that’s a relevant property to apply to a broken -off fragment of the void beyond time and space.

“Eventually, I encountered some humans,” Bill says. “I didn’t understand what I was seeing at the time. But they were creating structures. Like this.” Bill makes a triangle shape with his fingers. “And I thought, ‘A-hah! Sentient life!’”

Dipper barks laughter, he can’t help it. “Wait,” he says. “Wait, you… you saw people building a pyramid and thought the  _pyramid_  was something you could talk to?”

“Why manifest to the slaves when you can manifest to their god?” Bill asks. “What would you’ve done? If you’d seen little triangles building something in the shape of a man?” But his voice is sort of huffy. Defensive.

“That still doesn’t answer my question,” Dipper says. “People haven’t built pyramids for a while, and given you’re not trying to get busy with the Mystery Shack, I figure you’ve reconsidered your initial hypothesis.”

“The windows upstairs are  _very_  attractive.”

Dipper just smirks, cuddling closer to his weird jumble of alien. “I think,” he says, “you keep the shape to remind you that you did get it wrong. That you aren’t infallible.”

“That,” Bill says, “is the most sentimental nonsense I’ve ever had the misfortune of being projected with. The triangle is an appealing, if primitive, shape. It’s not my fault if you can’t appreciate that.”

“Who says I can’t appreciate it? Height times base divided by two is one of my favorite formulas.”

“Ooh, Pine Tree. You  _do_  know how to talk dirty.”

“Length times width times height divided by three,” says Dipper, laughing against smooth golden skin.

“Fuck,” Bill says, groaning. “Yes. More.”

Dipper is happy to oblige, reciting simplex formulae from four on up, until Bill pins him against the pillow and kisses him to breathlessness. Dipper has no idea if he’s actually being serious or not, whether Bill really is turned on by mathematical formulas. Dipper suspects, fingers running through coarse curls, mind pressing against something he can’t see but knows is there, that it doesn’t matter either way.

* * *

That night, he dreams of a clearing in a forest. His fingers are laced with someone else’s, pale peach against dark obsidian. Overhead, a silver moon beams a thin crescent smile.

No one says anything, because there doesn’t seem to be anything left to say. So they just stand, and watch, as a tiny pine sapling pushes its way through the earth, its fronds reaching bright green fractals into the glittering sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aa-aa-aa-and it's over! [Woohoo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xDf-_8KvGM)! Big thank you to everyone who's stuck with me so far. And to all the commenters, fanartists, reccers, kudosers, and bookmarkers; seriously, you guys rock, and you making Doing The Thing possible. ❤
> 
> Trivia: The file this fic was written in is called "coffeeshopau". Yeah. This is what I consider a "coffeeshop AU". Someone send help.
> 
> **Bonus content: Full soundtrack!**
> 
> [Intro](http://kahviholisti.tumblr.com/post/99986749606/work-in-progress-3). [Day 1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxRQNO8vg2Y). [Day 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBjQ9tuuTJQ). [Day 3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NqzdPVjGdM). [Day 4 (and 5)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ1c9ErCn7w). [Day 6](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBAIVEJ0lfM). [Day 7](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxIiPLVR6NA). [Day 8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsd6slFJgKc). [Day 9](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TffpkE2GU4). [Day 10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qjKHorRZg4). [Day 11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aa-d3_E86U). [Day ???](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s8-esX9DgI). [??? ???](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbgpjqNN2Vs). [Day 0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xDf-_8KvGM).

**Author's Note:**

> So apparently I have [a Tumblr](http://orphanfalls.tumblr.com/) now? Eek.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [waiting for the final moment](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4658853) by [atavistique (Rivers)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rivers/pseuds/atavistique)




End file.
